Wednesday 22 May: Labour lacks the moral vision to stand up for Israel on the global stage

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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743 thoughts on “Wednesday 22 May: Labour lacks the moral vision to stand up for Israel on the global stage”

  1. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) Story
    THE SHOVEL

    I woke for the toilet in the middle of the night and noticed a Muslim sneaking through next door’s garden.

    Suddenly my neighbour came from nowhere and smacked him over the head with a shovel killing him instantly.

    He then began to dig a grave with the shovel. Astonished, I got back into bed.

    My wife said, ‘Darling, you’re shaking, what is it?

    “You’ll never believe what I’ve just seen” I said, “That Bastard next door has still got my shovel”

  3. Good morning, chums. I hope you all slept well last night. And thanks for today’s post, Geoff. Today I did Wordle in 5:

    Wordle 1,068 5/6

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    ⬜⬜🟩🟨🟨
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  5. Good morning all.
    Heavy rain through the night is continuing with 8½°C on the yard thermometer.

    1. We had an incredibly intense thunderstorm yesterday evening. Gutters, downpipes and drains couldn’t cope and people further down our valley were hard-pressed to keep the water out.

    2. Morning Bob, dull start with rain forecast – a welcome change from the stifling heat of the last few days

  7. Good Morning Folks,

    Raining here

    Wordle 1,068 3/6

    🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜
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    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      1. At a seaside village in Valencia. Poured down all day yesterday.
        Today: 22°C
        Wednesday Sunny High: 22°C Low: 16°C

    3. Well done. 4 for me today.

      Wordle 1,068 4/6

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  8. So Ireland is set to recognise Palestine as a state today

    Palestine will reciprocate by recognising Ireland as a caliphate today

    1. I loathe the Irish state. Always chooses the wrong side on everything. A scabby , twisted little country.

  9. Police to get powers to ban disruptive protests under new plans. 22 May 2024.

    Police are to get new powers to ban protests that are likely to intimidate and disrupt communities under plans being considered by ministers.

    Chief constables would be able to block marches due to the “cumulative” disruption and “persistent” threats to public order caused by protests under changes to laws proposed in a report on political violence.

    Police forces would be allowed to impose conditions on protests and limit their frequency under changes to public order legislation if they judged that it was diverting too many officers away from fighting crime in local communities.

    What are the point of “powers” if the police are afraid to use them?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/21/ministers-consider-plans-police-power-ban-demonstrations/

    1. Only to be used against the ‘far right’ no doubt.

      And that ‘diverting too many officers away from fighting crime in local communities’ produced a hollow laugh AS. Away from their computers and thought policing more like.

    2. Banana eating white man piled on by 12 plods until the helicopter fleet arrives.

  11. Good morning, all. Weather…

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ae2559b68a134655a417cdc122535973a3bb5223e56a4b3cf3db403cfa97fef0.png

    What do Vallance, Whitty and Van Tam have in common? Paul Weston exposes the various links that tie these former government covid response drivers together. No surprises but exposure is needed, and needed on a regular basis. Lest the people forget.

    If these three aren’t bad enough I have to issue a warning to those of a nervous disposition that Blair appears briefly in a speaking role.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRQnym2CIgM

    1. Good morning, Korky.

      This morning heralds the 12th consecutive day of clear blue skies for me.

      2. My sole experience of Swedish clear skies was in December 1986 and I have never experienced weather so cold, before or after. The water vapour in my exhaled breath turned my moustache to an ice factory in no time. If the clouds appeared it snowed!

        I’m happy for you to have clear skies at this time of the year and I wish that here in Essex we could experience a few consecutive days of warm and dry weather.

        1. Where I live, in the far south, is on the same latitude as the Scottish borders, much further south than Spikey. Our summer weather is much the same as it in England and we seldom get much colder than England in winter.

          It’s a bit different up in the north, though. My only trip up into Arctic territory was over Christmas 2018. We went on a dog-sled ride over a frozen lake and the mushers told us that, at –15ªC it was a bit too ‘warm’ for the dogs. Apparently they perform better at temperatures lower than –20ºC. My beard (grown especially for the trip) was covered in hard frost!

          1. I was in Stockholm attending a course at Ericsson’s telecommunications training establishment. On the middle weekend we were offered the option of an escorted tour of Stockholm, including the Varsa(?) ship or going north to have a go at skiing. Further north? Thanks but no thanks. I enjoyed my day in the city of Stockholm.

          2. Wasa [you pronounced it correctly, though :•) ]. I visited that ship back in 1964 as a 13-year ld schoolboy. At that time it was draped in sheeting and constantly soaked in steam (to stop the timbers drying out).

      1. Gates funds 10% of WHO.

        Directly, maybe. I believe his input is greater via other associations that he ‘sponsors’.

    3. What horrid creature Blair is.
      But they all are.
      The others aren’t too different.
      Thanks Paul Weston.
      Not enough people will see this.
      The gates needs closing.
      I still don’t believe people in so called ‘executive’ positions have ever had the jabs, not enough of them suffered from problems or even died.
      If it doesn’t work (which it doesn’t) it can’t be called a vaccine.

  12. ‘Morning all – again! The first osprey bob has hatched at Loch Arkaig!

  13. 387508+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Wednesday 22 May: Labour lacks the moral vision to stand up for Israel on the global stage

    Wednesday 22 May: Labour lacks the moral vision to stand up for England on the domestic stage
    The desecration of the English patter is terrifying, linking labour & morals in any shape or form.

    How any of these overseeing, overbearing , treacherous, politico kapos / parties have the brass neck to even pass any sort of judgement on any foreign issues is beyond belief.

    Currently the labour party & supporters are a danger from the cradle to the grave to the decent peoples of these Isles. with the tory (ino) party alternately passing the baton.

    The only success these Isles are having from the Tay to the Channel, is in being a major WEF / NWO hub, with polling stations consent.

  14. SHORT PRISON SENTENCES

    SIR – Your report, “Thousands of criminals spared jail to ease crowding” (May 20), side-steps the critical point that short prison sentences have been proven to be less effective at reducing reoffending than community sentences and suspended sentences. This isn’t about being “soft” on crime; it is about following the evidence of what works.

    Even a short prison sentence can destroy someone’s life. People lose their home and job, and their children can be taken into care. When they come out of prison they must start again from scratch, which makes dealing with the problems that led to their offending much harder. This was the case even before the prisons started running out of space.

    If we really want to see less crime, fewer victims and safer communities, we need to look at the evidence for what is effective. We call on all political parties to support the presumption against short sentences as a commonsense way to reduce crime.

    Campbell Robb
    Chief executive, Nacro

    Pia Sinha
    Chief executive, Prison Reform Trust London EC2

    Campbell Robb (did your parents get your first name and surname conflated?) and Pia Sinha (whatever one of those are): you go to great pains to tell everyone willing to listen that, “Even a short prison sentence can destroy someone’s life.”

    Strange how you omit that those who are given prison sentences — of any length — are usually given them for destroying other people’s lives!

    But I suppose saying that would be going against your putrid Left-wing agenda and that would certainly not endear you to all the other hare-brained Pinko detritus that form your main audience.

    1. Em err,

      Strange how you forgot to omit that those….

      Did you really mean omit or did you mean admit?

      1. I meant ‘omit’ (now amended).
        I initially wrote “forgot to add…” but my proofreading was awry!🙄

    3. The call for longer sentences will defo be followed when PC Perry Lathwood gets his comeuppance next week for daring to confront a violent ethnic fare dodger while on duty.

      Met officer found guilty of assaulting female bus passenger
      PC Perry Lathwood handcuffed Jocelyn Agyemang last year over suspicion of fare evasion in Croydon.

    4. The call for longer sentences will defo be followed when PC Perry Lathwood gets his comeuppance next week for daring to confront a violent ethnic fare dodger while on duty.

      Met officer found guilty of assaulting female bus passenger
      PC Perry Lathwood handcuffed Jocelyn Agyemang last year over suspicion of fare evasion in Croydon.

    5. A day in the stocks might well nip a lot of crime in the bud.

      Dragging on the judicial process over decades serves nobody well. There is a lot of truth in the old adage that justice delayed is justice denied, and the punishment should take place as close in time after the crime as possible, and before memories fade and people change and resentments fester.

      Key to this is improving the likelihood of getting caught. Did I hear right that half the police forces in the country have not caught or charged a burglar in three years? What sort of judicial system is that?

      Critics say that the stocks are medieval and humiliating. Isn’t the point of punishment to be humiliating, and an inducement not to do it again? They are certainly a lot cheaper than keeping someone in hotel accommodation for decades pushing up Government borrowing. It would need the necessary woodwork, a padlock, a steward to ensure that public retribution is fair and health & safety is observed – it is not there to express bloodlust, or push the trapped offender into Intensive Care, but to dispense justice, and the more conscious and aware the offender is, the better. There would be a notice stating the offence, and a free supply of rotting vegetation and similar soft, obnoxious but non-dangerous weaponry to hand. Merchants of such materials could even be licensed as stewards, so it is worth their while taking on the job.

      At the end of the sentence, the offender is released, reminded what would happen if the crime is repeated, and given every opportunity to make amends to society and make a more positive contribution in future. Above all, it would keep the prisons free for those whose very presence is a danger to society and cannot be redeemed.

      2. What’s staggering is there are some burglars out there with dozens, no hundreds of convictions.

        After three, throw away the key.

    7. Grizzly, could you refrain from using bold, please? For quotes, please use the block quote tools – either the quotation icon or < blockquote>quote!. That makes it easier to distinguish your reply beneath it.

      1. I have absolutely no intention, whatsoever, from refraining from using bold type for my comments to letters. Bold and italic have long been that standard manner of enhancing script for specific purposes.

        ‘Blockquite’ is a modern affection that will never be found in books, newspapers or scientific journals and I, personally, have no use for them.

    1. I’m glad you edited it. They might have thought you were as illiterate as me!🤣

      BTW. You still haven’t told us what that Light Programme show was (your music poser of two days ago).

      1. I was not a quiz!!
        There was a Light Programme programme that used that tune, but I can not remember what it was!!

        1. I spent ages going through an online list of the Light Programmes output, but nothing there gave me any clear evidence that theme music was used for any of those.

          I remember Winfred Atwell’s version clearly but not as a theme tune.

  16. Like the Tories, Labour is wholly deficient in morality. But even if it had a sliver of it, it’s electoral imperative would prevent it supporting Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. Soon, with the uncontrolled immigration of mainly Muslim men and the ever growing numbers of Muslims here, Islamist will control British foreign policy like they control the streets of London.

    1. Morning Tom. I suppose that in a way we Nottlers have seen the best of times. Very probably the best in the whole of human history. It is now all coming to an end. We might be fortunate for it to be a war. I am at present reading histories of both the Spartan and Assyrian States. Both collapsed within ten years of reaching their peak. We can see the West dissolving around us. Our leaders are corrupt, decadent liars. The people heedless of their fate.

      1. Good Morning!

        All too true AS. It’s certainly a rational assessment. I’m currently reading a modern history of Russia from 1900 on. There are huge similarities between the last days of the USSR and our president predicament as well, with our own woke nomenklatura acting in a very similar way to the Bolsheviki who ran that doomed construction.

        But never give up, and keep the faith.

      2. ‘Twas ever thus!

        We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.

        [King Lear]

    2. It’s voter base is mostly ethnics. The nasty ones, who no one likes. Blair brought them here to create a voting block. If Labour upset them they’re in for all sorts of trouble.

  17. 387508+ up ticks,

    Seemingly the wholesale WEF / NWO treachery meted out via the lab/lib/con
    mass government controlled illegal immigration. paedophile umbrella coalition party is paying dividends.

    First you create the problem…….

    Dt,
    Government advises households to prepare national crisis ‘emergency kit’
    Oliver Dowden says homes should be self-sufficient in case of events such as floods, power outages, cyber attacks or war
    Emergency supplies
    Are you stocked up for a national emergency? CREDIT:
    Every household should have an emergency pack of three days’ food and water so they can be self-sufficient in the event of a national crisis, the Deputy Prime Minister will say…

    1. Only 3 days?
      I’ve got at least a month’s worth of tinned food in store!

      1. I have at least 6 months back-up inc bottled water and 2 freezers full of pre-made meals. Enough LPG to heat it and a genny for power

      2. Obviously a hard-right hoarder. But don’t be ashamed, because Labour will oblige you capitalists to share everything.

        1. And if we don’t share it, they’ll come and batter the doors down. Looters, these people are called.

    2. What are they cooking up? 😎

      Three days of food back-up? Sounds about as realistic as three weeks to flatten the curve.

      I have a stock of canned meat, tuna, vegetables, flour, yeast, rice, pasta etc. and have had since late 2020. Now it appears that water is on their agenda and so I’ll have to buy plenty of that, too.

      I have plenty of rainwater but if we’re going to have problems then I expect the power to enable me to boil it will also be cut off.

    3. All those things are directly affected by government policy. Food production – the state is forcing down our food production under the insane green agenda. It wants farmer to plants flowers. It calls this nonsense the ‘national food strategy’ (to reduce it).

      Energy is also entirely the fault of ministers for refusing to frack, build gas, coal and oil power stations. We need about 5 times as many and dozens of micro nuclear. What does big fat state do? It rams 500 tons of concrete, 100 tons of steel, rare earth metals and fibre glass into the sea bed.

      Floods could also be resolved – stop building on flood plains, dredge rivers and build reservoirs. It won’t do any of that because the EU forbids it.

      Every problem this idiot raises is entirely the fault of government.

      1. 387508+ up ticks,

        Afternoon W,
        “Every problem this idiot raises is entirely the fault of government,”

        Seen through the eyes of the
        WEF /NWO these political overseers are successful assets.

        The majority voter seems to agree
        time after time after time.

  19. SIR – I was horrified to read that Marks & Spencer will be adding even more mayonnaise to its sandwiches (Business, May 20).

    Unable to buy a sandwich without mayonnaise, I make my own when going to town for a day’s shopping.

    Rosemary Rowley-Wootton
    Kidderminster, Worcestershire

    Indeed, Rosemary. Most ready-made mayonnaise is made from poisonous seed oils (usually rapeseed) so that fact alone makes ready-made sandwiches inedible. [Real mayonnaise is made from good quality mild olive oil.]

    What is really appalling though is that every day, thousands of tons of such items are thrown away into landfill sites since they remain unsold. I have lost count of the number of shops and supermarkets — in the UK and abroad — that I have entered, late in the day, and noticed chiller cabinets still full of unsold sandwiches. They don’t go on sale thereafter (unless, of course, the shop owner is a scoundrel).

    In a world that is vastly overpopulated by humans, the fact that so much ‘fast’ food is manufactured and then destroyed without being eaten, is clear unassailable evidence of just how irredeemably stupid mankind, as a species, has become.

    Too stupid, in fact, to make their own sandwiches from proper ingredients.

      1. That is a truly shocking story. I could barely read it. I couldn’t find what the cause of the sepsis was. He is my age with a four year old daughter. I remember the statement last year. I couldn’t have imagined it was anything so dreadful. Poor man.

    2. The food is usually given away to charities who give it to the homeless/rough sleepers. Shops and the charity folk do this without fanfare.

  20. Electric cars kill pedestrians at double the rate of petrol or diesel vehicles, a study in a BMJ journal has found.

    Experts said that electric or hybrid cars were twice as likely to be involved in a road accident with a bystander than a petrol or diesel car over the same distance.

    The researchers suggested the vehicles’ quieter engines were a significant factor in higher fatality rates and called on the Government to mitigate the risks as it phases out petrol and diesel cars in pursuit of net zero.

    The study looked at the number of casualties from road collisions in Britain between 2013 and 2017 using Road Safety Data and calculated the number of pedestrians that had been hit by different types of cars.

    Over the period, 96,285 pedestrians were hit by a car or taxi. While three-quarters of these people had been hit by a car with a combustion engine, this was because they covered significantly more miles.

    Well well well….

    1. “The researchers suggested the vehicles’ quieter engines were a significant factor in higher fatality rates and called on the Government to mitigate the risks as it phases out petrol and diesel cars in pursuit of net zero.”

      Since one of the principal aims of Net Zero is to kill us off by making it impossible for old and poor people to heat and feed themselves properly then surely a few extra pedestrians being killed off is an added bonus for the global warming zealots?

      1. Lefty greens do fervently hate humanity. I do as well, but theirs is truly vicious and they keep trying to implement it.

    2. Plus they are heavier which cannot help when they plough onto you. I am convinced this push for 20 mph limits is:
      – to facilitate the introduction of self-driving cars
      – to get is all for speeding with points on our license so we are petrified to drive
      – to allow for the impact of BEvs when they crunch into you

      Not necessarily in that order.

      I liked the other conspiracy theory that if a road is 20 mph the local council doesn’t have to maintain it to such a high standard.

  21. Electric cars kill pedestrians at double the rate of petrol or diesel vehicles, a study in a BMJ journal has found.

    Experts said that electric or hybrid cars were twice as likely to be involved in a road accident with a bystander than a petrol or diesel car over the same distance.

    The researchers suggested the vehicles’ quieter engines were a significant factor in higher fatality rates and called on the Government to mitigate the risks as it phases out petrol and diesel cars in pursuit of net zero.

    The study looked at the number of casualties from road collisions in Britain between 2013 and 2017 using Road Safety Data and calculated the number of pedestrians that had been hit by different types of cars.

    Over the period, 96,285 pedestrians were hit by a car or taxi. While three-quarters of these people had been hit by a car with a combustion engine, this was because they covered significantly more miles.

    Well well well….

  22. Allison Pearson giving it some wellie:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2024/05/21/infected-blood-scandal-horizon-maternity-corrupt-britain/

    “Horizon, maternity, infected blood – what other scandals await corrupt Britain?

    The major outrages which come along with numbing frequency all fundamentally spring from one attitude: ordinary people don’t count

    21 May 2024 • 9:03pm

    Something is rotten in the state of Britain. We all sense it, I think, in interactions with the authorities – where every little thing becomes an anger-management ordeal. We glimpse it when a neighbour, giddy with triumph, reports that they used a public service and it actually worked (shout out to His Majesty’s Passport Office now issuing passports promptly, or so I’m told). The rottenness is blatantly evident in the two fingers stuck up to the general public by allowing net immigration to rocket over 700,000. It is written on the face of the new mother who comes out of hospital after a bloody ordeal in which her baby was lucky to have survived (the birth invariably ends in an emergency C-section which should have been carried out 10 hours before but the midwife had a thing for natural deliveries).

    We see it in the way patients are treated (and increasingly not treated) by the NHS. A friend’s mother received a serious cancer diagnosis last week. Clare and her sister asked the doctor to talk them through other treatment options from the one he had just outlined. “You’re getting a free service,” said the doctor, loftily rebuking the frightened daughters. As though simply wondering what else might be available for their mum was somehow heretical, an insult to the all-powerful, magnanimous NHS, before whom we must prostrate ourselves like humble worshippers.

    “You get what you’re given and you like it or lump it,” is how Clare described the doctor’s condescending attitude. That’s our rotten, second-world country in a nutshell.

    The major scandals which seem to come along with numbing frequency – Hillsborough, BSE, Mid Staffs (where hundreds of patients died from poor care), Grenfell, Shrewsbury and Telford (maternity scandal), Windrush, Morecambe Bay NHS Trust (11 dead babies), East Kent maternity scandal, the ongoing Post Office horror show and now, maybe the worst, the infected blood calamity – all spring fundamentally from that one attitude: ordinary people don’t count.

    If people cause a fuss when, say, a young woman says it’s not right that both her parents died of Aids and she was orphaned because the UK imported blood donated by druggies and prisoners which ministers said was the “best treatment available” when that was a lie, then those nuisances must be shut down. Fobbed off. Requests for a public inquiry denied for as long as possible. So the people who do count, who privately run the show, can get away with it. Again.

    In a thrillingly good (in both senses; excellently composed and virtue-rich) speech on Monday to victims and relatives of the deceased, Sir Brian Langstaff, the chairman of the Infected Blood Inquiry, came up with a perfect example of that self-serving elite. He quoted one civil servant’s memo complaining that a health minister had started to be too sympathetic to the victims. Can’t have that, can we? I mean, why would 30,000 people poisoned by their own health service, 3,000 of whom have died – with two more dying every week – merit any sympathy from the government that gave them their death sentence in the first place?

    (Strong echoes here of Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Sub-postmasters took the rap for the faulty system those in authority had given them, without adequate testing, and then management pretended not to know about its faults to save their skins until the postmasters were dead, in jail or the poor things merely thought they’d lost their minds.)

    A slight, almost dainty figure with soft silver hair, Sir Brian looks how vicars used to look when they still believed in God. Turns out he possesses in abundance what the British state lacks: moral courage and a conscience.

    “It will be astonishing to anyone who reads this report that these events could have happened in the UK,” Sir Brian writes. “It may also be surprising that the questions why so many deaths and infections occurred have not had answers before now. Those answers cannot be as complete as they might have been 30 years ago… I have no doubt, however, that… the conclusion that wrongs were done on individual, collective and systemic levels is fully justified by the pages that follow; that a level of suffering which it is difficult to comprehend, still less understand, has been caused to so many, and that this harm has, for those who survived long enough to face it and for those who, infected and affected, are now able to read this, been compounded by the reaction of the government, NHS bodies, other public bodies, the medical professions and others.”

    Listen to the appalled tenderness in the inquiry chairman’s voice when he describes a one-year-old baby who was given HIV in a blood transfusion (a devastating fact revealed to his parents by the ever-caring NHS in a hospital corridor). The little boy went on to develop full-blown Aids, his father lost his job because of the stigma, the family had to move house after their car was scratched (“Aids Dead”, the graffiti said) until, finally, “this fragile boy, wasting away, died at the age of seven”.

    If you find yourself wondering what is the point of trying to get some of the bastards who allowed contaminated blood to be injected into trusting patients arrested and brought to trial, I suggest you keep re-reading Sir Brian’s description of that baby boy.

    Hopefully, somewhere in Whitehall, a Sir Tufton Bufton is right this minute banging his puce bonce up against the oak panelling because the Establishment thought Brian Langstaff, a former High Court judge, was one of them. A decent fellow who could be relied upon to deliver a toothless “mistakes having been made, lessons will be learnt” report that would not lift up the carpet under which all the corruption, the collusion, the shredding of medical records, and the experiments on children had been swept. Instead, Sir Brian gave them both barrels for a “chilling cover-up” that hid the truth for more than 40 years, a “tragedy” which, in large part, could have been avoided. No wonder he got a rapturous standing ovation from family members at the event of remembrance.

    I have read his entire 2,527-page report and the most shocking section, amid a gallery replete with horrors, focuses on Treloar College, which specialised in treating children with haemophilia. The Hampshire state school’s on-site NHS centre gave children injections of different types of Factor VIII (plasma blood products), with clinicians being “well aware” of the risk of infecting them with HIV and hepatitis.

    “The children,” Sir Brian reports, “were often regarded as objects for research rather than, first and foremost, as children whose treatment should be firmly focused on their individual best interests alone. This was unethical and wrong. There were multiple research projects during the 1970s and early 1980s when informed consent for participation was neither sought nor given.”

    Surely, any clinician involved in those unauthorised experiments was, at the very least, in breach of the Nuremberg Code? Get police to track them down.

    One Treloar pupil, now a grown man, recalled that doctors let his class know who had contracted HIV by pointing at individual boys and saying “You, not you, yes you are HIV positive et cetera… ” Hard to think of a more grotesquely insensitive way to tell a child they have a fatal illness. Only 30 of the 122 pupils with haemophilia at Treloar in the Seventies and Eighties are still alive. It was a state-sponsored massacre.

    Meanwhile, as all that was about to be revealed like a never-ending Greek tragedy, on the BBC’s Politics Live, a Conservative MP called Tom Hunt piped up in defence of the NHS. “The British people love the NHS,” this fool explained, and most staff working in the NHS are “wonderful people”.

    Are they really, Tom? Presumably, not the ones who injected kids with blood products they knew had a fair chance of giving them HIV and a shortened lifespan? On the very day that the NHS was declared guilty of “indefensible” and “unconscionable” behaviour and, furthermore, of not informing patients of the grave risks of a medical treatment, a politician was still defending our monstrously useless health service.

    Only when politicians like Hunt stop this craven, kneejerk deference and are prepared to hold a socialist bureaucracy (which gobbles up more than £160 billion annually) to account, will the public have a chance of being protected against further cover-ups and tragedies.

    I would go further. It is all very well the media celebrating interim compensation payments of £210,000 (potentially £2.7 million per person infected with HIV). While that is undoubtedly belated good news for the grieving families – although not for the poor taxpayer who must foot the vast bill for the criminal stupidity and corruption of an elite, untouchable class – we should not be deflected from considering whether there is evidence here for charges of corporate manslaughter, or misconduct in public office, to be brought.

    (The awful complacency of the ruling class when it comes to the suffering of ordinary people was revealed when Sir John Major told the inquiry that the infected blood scandal was “incredibly bad luck”. That’s one way of describing the deaths of 3,000 innocent people, John. Tory grandee and former health secretary Ken Clarke was even worse, angering Sir Brian with his “unfairly dismissive and disparaging” attitude towards many who had suffered. Lord Clarke saw no reason why he should give evidence and appeared unrepentant about a misleading statement in which he had claimed there was “no conclusive proof” that Aids could be spread through blood in 1983.)

    Other countries dealt with their contaminated blood scandals more than 20 years ago. In France, in 1999, the former socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius, former social affairs minister Georgina Dufoix, and former health minister Edmond Herve were charged with manslaughter. Herve was found guilty (although not jailed) while Fabius and Dufoix were acquitted. Dr M Garretta, the director of the National Blood Centre (Centre National de transfusion sanguine), was sentenced to four years in prison.

    Rishi Sunak said that Monday was “a day of shame for the British state”. But those were just words, Prime Minister. France proved that shame actually meant something by bringing criminal charges against key figures. That is what we need here, right now, in the UK. To begin to rebuild shattered public trust as well as putting the fear of God into the high priests of our disgraced national religion, the NHS.

    You know, there is only one sentence of Sir Brian’s superb, scathing summary I disagreed with. “It will be astonishing to anyone who reads this report that these events could have happened in the UK,” he wrote. Are we really surprised that such evil was allowed to happen here? Not anymore. As long as the elite gets away with parroting their “Never again” (until the next time) and the ordinary person doesn’t count, there will be something rotten in the state of Britain.”

    1. Are we really surprised that such evil was allowed to happen here?

      Par for the course is it not?

    2. “Horizon, maternity, infected blood – what other scandals await corrupt Britain?

      As serious and harmful as the above scandals are/were they will pale into insignificance when the truth of the last 3+ years is finally exposed. The body count is mounting, innumerable businesses wrecked, families split asunder and people’s rights suspended. Time for full exposure in the MSM. Wishful thinking!

      2. Nothing will happen whatsoever. Huge mountains of paperwork will be produced keeping officialdom in taxpayers cash for a good while to come. When it does publish absolutely nothing of any value will come out of it and never be considered again.

    3. Allison Pearson is absolutely wonderful. She puts most other journalists to shame. Staunchly truthful and fearless. How the rotten and corrupt elites in the MSM, politicos and assorted vile quangos, who rape us of our money, must hate her.

    4. If the £35k tax i paid last year, £12k went on welfare and a further £12K went to the NHS. Free it ain’t. If a doctor had said that to me, he would have had a strip torn off him.

      1. And somewhere in excess of £2.5k was used solely to pay interest on debt because the Treasury elite are incapable of budgeting.

        1. Heh, it is capable, it choose not to. The state never gets any smaller. It always metastasizes and government protects it. Never does the Chancellor stand up and say ‘the following departments will be closed, permanently and staff made redundant’.

          The state is now so obese it simply cannot function.

      2. Likewise.

        £35k? Have you counted/estimated ALL tax? Income Tax, Council Tax, CGT, VAT, APD, Fuel Duty, VED etc, etc? You might be in for a shock if you haven’t.

        1. No, that was just PAYE. Don’t get me started…..

          Edit. I did a few years ago and was on about 55%. But if you buy a house then it has the potential to go stratospheric. We bought our current one in 2011 and stamp duty was £32k on a purchase of £720-ish. I said then, I am not prepared to move again and pay the state any more money.

      3. Likewise.

        £35k? Have you counted/estimated ALL tax? Income Tax, Council Tax, CGT, VAT, APD, Fuel Duty, VED etc, etc? You might be in for a shock if you haven’t.

        1. They should have flown into the UK, where they would have been treated for nothing, because stupid idiots think healthcare should be free for all, even if they have paid nothing into the system..

          Look into a mirror to see one of those stupid idiots.

        1. Well of course there is absolutely no middle ground between our way and the American way.
          (Sigh).

      6. I would have said the same; I paid in hundreds of thousands in NICs and tax over the years I was working. I’d have told him it isn’t free, I’ve paid for it.

    5. They all miss the point. They all miss that big government never ever pays the price for it’s incompetence. The tax payer does. No one gets the sack, no one is kicked out of a high window.

  23. Good day all and the 77th,

    Well, it’s dreich here at Castle McPhee. All day. Wind in the West, 12-14℃. I’ve cancelled my plan to go fishing today.

    Woke early this morning and listened to this podcast video. Introduced by Ivor Cummins it’s a film of a chap by the name of Eddie Hobbes giving a talk on the global situation to an audience in Cork. It’s a great summary and well worth an hour and a quarter of your time on a wet day. Pass it on.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk8ZPZS_P7Q

  24. I see there are calls for the smug, condescending Ken Clarke to be stripped of his peerage in the aftermath of the Blood affair. What about little Johnny Major. Was he not involved in failing to do the right thing at the time?

    1. “Former prime minister Sir John Major has described the contaminated blood scandal as “incredibly bad luck”, drawing gasps from families watching him give evidence under oath to the public inquiry into the disaster.”

      That was in 2022. He was involved at the Treasury way back and did sod all.

          3. Sag a loo.
            It’s hard to imagine and would not have been a pretty sight.
            Did you know Nigel Fricker ?

          5. His honour QC (K) wouldn’t like that.
            I knew him late 70s, did a lot of work on one of his properties in Hampstead.
            I couldn’t believe it, he’s 86 now.

          8. I was fishing from the beach near Weybourne once and some one told us he lived nearby.

    2. Funny how so many of our political idiots come across as intently stupid.

    3. Clarke has been chosen as the scapegoat. Just as the dumb ole Duke of York was for the Epstein scandal, to protect the politicos on the still unpublished client list.

    4. When Clarke said you couldn’t get ill from infected blood it was clear he was either stupid or utterly misinformed. He’s not ‘stupid’, being possessed of the low cunning to get himself rich off the tax payer. Which leaves misinformed. I imagine his perm. sec said that line to him and he promoted it to protect the department – as a good Lefty does.

  25. A gentle reminder from YTer Matty Taylor..

    If the British political class.. the Govt, MSM, college of policing, judges, politicians, lawyers, police forces all conspired to purposely allow tens of thousands “foreign gentlemen” to torture, groom, assault and occasionally kill a couple of hundred thousand children.. if they are so morally bereft they don’t care about your children.. then why suppose they are shamed about covering up a tainted blood scandal?

  26. Morning all 🙂😊☔️
    Still chucking it down. And more on the way.
    Labour have never been able to understand majority reasoning. Even coming close they will also ruin peoples lives, because they feel ‘so sorry’ for those in our now strange and twisted society. Many of whom do nothing to support the general interests of those who get out of bed in the morning and go to work to support the lazy labour supporters who generally do not work and have never contributed a single penny towards our national overall wellbeing. Something that they willing grab and take advantage of.
    The problem is that all of those in Wastemonster and Whitehall live in cloud cuckoo land and are out of contact with reality.
    As we see more often than not, when something goes terribly wrong, they lie and banter with the lives of the public just to try and make some sort of celebratory point. But do nothing to help the situation they have been involved in.

  27. When I was interviewed for a Civil Service job back in the early 1990s, I was asked what I would do about starving children in Africa. This was a test of my analytical ability, and replaced by Blair’s “competences” ticking the correct diversity boxes and possessing the correct people skills down the pub and “delivering a quality service”, whatever that means. I think I put the case for fair trade and intermediate technology, whereby Africans could make a decent living in their villages, rather than being tempted to come here for a better life.

    There was an article in the Aussie Spectator (which still allows comments from beyond their subscription base for now) about The Real Reason for Africa’s Poverty, being nothing to do with Critical Race Theory, and rather more to do with local corruption. I wrote this BTL:

    “The village parson at the time when I bought my cottage, a mild man from Devon, spoke fluent Swahili. I think he was a throwback to the British Empire, when speaking the local lingo was quite a handy tool for the budding colonialist. In 1999, open warfare was about to break out in South West Tanganyika after a bishop died in office. The urban congregation’s choice to replace him was opposed by one proposed by the rural congregation. They hated each other, and a far-from-Christian tribal skirmish was about to erupt in a far-flung corner of the Commonwealth.

    Adopting classic British compromise, Lambeth Palace told them that neither candidate was going to be bishop, and they were getting this mild little white man from Devon instead to be their Bishop. He spent seven years there sorting them out. What struck me most about African worship is their incapacity to pray quietly. The celebrations during a church service could usually be heard in the next village, and they all seemed to be having a great time.

    What he told me about his time in the Lambeth Conference was that he was forever trying to sort out the schism between the Africans and the Americans. It seems that the Americans were perfectly relaxed about homosexuality, but took a very dim view of church officials pocketing the collection. In Africa though, it was the other way round.

    It suggests that America may be rich, but is also debauched; Africa may have an impeccable sense of traditional family values, but it is poor.

    Corruption or decadence? You take your choice, or adopt a classic British compromise and have both.”

    1. When my father entered the Sudan Political Service he was obliged to take the Civil Service Arabic exams. Being diligent, he worked hard and passed out top of his year.

      My mother, unlike my father who had a fist class Cambridge degree in classics, had no academic qualifications at all. But she was far better at communicating with the African hoi polloi and her domestic staff as my father’s Arabic was far too good!

      1. Maybe he could have used his expertise in subverting Arabic grammar, making a mockery of it and delighting his African hosts?

        When I was working in Communist Poland in 1979, memories of life under the Third Reich were still quite raw. I had no Russian and little Polish, but we had German as a common language. They hated talking in German though, but used to make a complete nonsense, quite deliberately, of German grammar. For example, if German rules at the end of a sentence the operative verb to be put, to be put at the start of it would be Polish practice, infuriating the Germans and setting off a wry little smile amid the Poles.

    2. Leave them alone. However yes, if you say that you don’t do very well. Note that it’s ‘starving children’, never ‘famine’.

      It’s an interesting phrasing. I was asked how I would end the Bosnian war. In my head I said ‘shoot the muslims’ but that doesn’t go down very well. The war was well documented, but the reason for it is lost to history.

      2. ‘Starving children in Africa” was a staple used by generations of parents to get their kids to eat up their greens. The standard response was “well, they are welcome to mine”.

        Bosnia is not the best example of Muslim atrocity. Most Bosnian Muslims are descended from the tail reaches of Ottoman aspiration before they hit the Christian wall. It was Marshal Tito who kept a lid on the feuding, but when he died, I regret to say that the worst culprits there were the Serb Christians rather than the Muslims.

        1. When I wouldn’t drink my milk in infant school I was lectured on the starving children in China.

    3. There’s a passage in Scoop by Evelyn Waugh about African bushmen having long since been converted to Christianity, so that no self-respecting tribesman would be seen eating human flesh in public during Lent.

  28. I wonder if this blood scandal will make people realise that if the PTB can obfuscate and refuse to admit the damage caused by infected blood for 40 years then how long will it take them to admit their responsibility for the damage caused by the Covid gene therapy?

    France, Germany and even Ireland – who used the same blood as the UK – all admitted responsibility over 20 year ago!

    It is time that everybody woke up to the fact the the State is the enemy of the people.

    1. More proof that our political classes have effed up everything they come into contact with.
      I wonder if there are other conditions contained and not realised back then and possibly passed on by now parents born back then, to thier recent off-spring in preset times.

      1. Much depends on which side you look at it from. If you look at it as a citizen, the state has completely failed this country and made a pigs ear of everything.

        If you look at it from the EU side, or any other of our international economic or political enemies, big fat state has done a wonderful job.

        1. True, but we’re not in the EU.
          Although our votes not to be hasn’t seemed to change anything.

          1. The latest news (not from the BBC)

            Sunak is on a whistle-stop visit to Vienna this morning to promote his border policy. Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer has said at a joint press conference that the UK is a “pioneer” for pursuing third-country removals with the Rwanda plan. He makes clear:

            “Asylum proceedings should happen in safe third countries. The UK is therefore a pioneer for this model – a model that will be important for Europe as well. The Rwanda model will be a solution for us to have asylum proceedings in safe third countries and that’s something we need to put on the EU’s agenda as well… Asylum proceedings in safe third countries means the business model of promising people to get them within the borders of the EU or UK no longer applies, that promise can no longer be made if we have such procedures.”

            Crucially Nehammer reveals that up to 15 other European states, namechecking Denmark, are also pushing for a Rwanda-style model. EU politicians have started to follow the wind on this one…
            .

            …but will the BBC now change its attitude towards Ruanda now that the sainted EU approves?

          2. Give it a few years and Rwanda will be in turmoil – it has been before – and no doubt someone in government will either say that this couldn’t have been foreseen or, if its a Labour minister, that his/her/its party had foreseen it and that Tory incompetence/malice was responsible for the plight of innocent asylum seekers now trapped in the horrors of Rwanda.

          3. We are not in the EU in name only. For all other intents and purposes we’re joined at the hip 🙁

    2. When people do realise that, they also realise that big government is the most dangerous thing imaginable.

      Most folk just bumble through their lives and get to the end of them unscathed, unthinking about the big stuff because the normal things – scout groups, hobbies, gardening, walking the dog, seeing the mother in law, swimming lessons, going to work and traffic – are all vastly more important.

      However when folk eventually join the dots and realise that big fat state is behind everything that makes their lives harder their opinions start to change. A friend of ours says he can no longer take his kid to swimming lessons. As junior goes as well we’re car sharing. However, the reason he can’t is petrol prices. Who does he blame? Oil companies. Thus on the way there – with a very large dog (as Mongo goes where Junior goes), two small boys this poor fellow get a haranguing about taxes on fuel and how that affects inflation, costs, compound taxes….

      When we arrived he said ‘Where did you learn all this?’ so I gave him a book list and a set of websites to visit.

    3. Trouble is, Richard, that a substantial majority do NOT think that way. They think the state is great; they queue for their jabs; bang saucepans; smile at slammers threatening to destroy Israel; admire the alphabet people indoctrinating their children…the end is listless.

    4. For many years before and some years since, I supported the idea of a more independent UK outside of the EU. I still do, but no longer linger under the delusion that it would help solve or ease some of the UK’s difficulties. It’s now evident that the UK is the cause of many of the UK’s problems and that our relationship with the EU has little bearing on why they arise or how they are to be eased or solved. On the evidence of what you’ve posted, the states of France, Germany and Ireland are less of an enemy to their people than ours is to us.

  29. Ok this a link to a JP Sears video in which he takes the piss out of American students’ performative emoting on behalf of the Palestinians. But what is truly shocking is the violence that these students are perpetrating. I haven’t seen it in the UK news (mainly because I don’t watch the news)!

    https://awakenwithjp.com/pages/videos

  30. A bigger company wants to buy/merge with our little one. I remembered a phrase my Dad used to say:

    “Loo roll. Judge them by their toilet roll. Good loo roll, buy it. Bad loo roll, walk away. If they treat the most undignified thing with care and thought, they’re a keeper.”

    Thus in one of the breaks we nipped to the loos and found this astonishing combination of sandpaper and glossy non-adsorbent rubbish. On talking to some of the staff the ones who were presented were all on message and very up beat. Being me, I found their grumpiest, most annoying person – they are usually also the most efficient and best at their jobs, having been kept in it for years at a time as they don’t say the right things. He was actually the most interesting and made my decision up, so I voted no, as did John the Lawyer bloke and Mrs Clarke. We might lose a couple of people as they’re paying more and that’s ok, be good for their careers.

    Mrs Clarke sent the vote back to them today. In the meanwhile I’ve got to pootle on site as apparently there’s a VPN problem.

  31. Foreign Office HQ is where British interests go to die. 22 May 2024.

    It is hard to pick out a low point from my dealings with the Foreign Office when I was defence secretary. Hard not because there weren’t any low points, but because there were so many.

    Like the time of the Sudan emergency, when it turned out that the ambassador, the deputy ambassador, and the head of security were all out of the country on holiday at the time of the coup, leaving us basically blind.

    Or when, during the evacuation of Kabul, it turned out that the only thing the Foreign Office’s rapid deployment team had done was “rapidly redeploy” themselves back to the UK just as the military and Ministry of Defence civil servants flew into danger. Or the constant efforts to block lethal aid to Ukraine for fear of “upsetting and provoking” Putin.

    It is strange that Wallace never bothered to mention this or the dire state of the Ministry of Defence when he was in charge. In fact as I recall both drew his unstinting praise.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/21/foreign-office-hq-is-where-british-interests-go-to-die/

  32. Not bad:
    Wordle 1,068 4/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. I have had a run of bad luck but today is better:
      Wordle 1,068 3/6

      ⬜⬜🟨🟨🟩
      ⬜🟨🟩⬜🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  33. After my four Amaryllis plants produced a produced a glorious display of 14 blooms, I now have five seedpods close to ripening.
    Would anyone like one so they can try and grow their own plants?

      1. Caroline has the same effect on plants which is why her sister gave her the Amaryllis. It is still going strong because she followed the advice which was not to touch it, not to water it, and not to interfere with it in any way.

    2. I had an amaryllis that my first flat mate’s mum gave me 35-odd years ago but it went AWOL in one of my many moves. I’ve always regretted it but given we are off in 3 years it would not be sensible for me to have another one. But a lovely offer!

    3. My sister bought mum one many Moons ago, and it was promptly Christened ‘Triffid’.

    4. Ours currently outside “rotting off” after a similarly fabulous showing in the conservatory during the recent months. After that it’ll go into a dark place to go dormant and come out again in the Autumn ready for winter.

      It’s been a good year for the amaryllis, it seems.

    5. Caroline’s sister gave her an amaryllis for Christmas which has just produced its best ever flower.

      John Milton compared those who scorn delights and live laborious days with those who prefer to sport with Amaryllis in the shade. I fall into the second category but I must go and do some toiling in the garden this afternoon.

  34. I wonder why we need a Foreign Office. Wasn’t there a joke in Yes Minister about replacing it with a fax machine?

  35. Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen from a very soggy Derby.
    Driving in to site this morning involved an amount of queuing on various busy roads, including a stretch of the A38 (a hateful road if ever there was one). There was a huge amount of surface water and large, fairly deep puddles, mainly at the curb side, although depending on the camber, sometimes on the central reservation. This was entirely due to the effects of Climate Change and nothing whatsoever to do with the estimated 75% of road drains being blocked or obstructed by debris.
    Also, Evil Tory Cuts prevent proper road maintenance, although fortunately this hasn’t interrupted the financing of the Diversity industry.

  36. ‘Morning all

    All too gloomy today I’ll try and raise a smile……..

    Wakey Wakey

    https://x.com/thefigen_/status/1792576970175267135?s=46&t=1X8QCg4BVqY7bqVbNv2HbA

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6e51357da0dca57d01a65d9a68931a80e3c84dbb518d346535757ac4deef9ac4.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e01ec357ec405a915ae70ffa7449558c866d0ba8a88a13a1daf72adb929984ed.gif

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6391d7eb77f3db6141e8ea01b34e8104b0a36615cc5ce0f3b71dd99e47434660.gif

    1. The submissive cat reminds me of Sunak being bullied by his cabinet into going back on his promises on immigration.

    1. I occasionally helped gun crews to do that – but with a 5.5inch gun (much bigger than the one in the photo) and even the Commanding Officer had been seen helping on one occasion.

    2. That was posted once before, and I said that the soldiers are remarkably mudless.

  38. I notice many of you discus the current and potential weather forecast. I often consult the Radio Times, which almost invariably predicts continuous drivel all week, and it is usually one hundred percent correct. They know absolutely nothing about the weather though!

    1. Bad weather is triggered by us not paying enough in taxes.
      As I understand it.

    2. I keep an app called “Windy” for the weather. It’s seldom less than 100% correct at all times. The difference being that while the BBC wants us all to use the weather forecast as some sort of climate catastrophe porn the Windy app is used a lot by pilots who need to know what is really going on in the atmosphere whenever they risk their lives at 20,000 ft.

  39. Blimey, what a day for corking DT articles.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/21/courage-of-iranian-people-shames-craven-international-elite/

    The courage of the Iranian people shames the craven international elite

    “While women in Iran risk their lives to celebrate Raisi’s death, global bodies show how sick they are

    21 May 2024 • 6:52pm

    The women of Iran are dancing. Women blinded, with one eye, or one arm, are dancing. Iranian Kurds are dancing. Across Europe, Iranian dissidents are dancing. Iranians – often, relatives of the regime’s victims – are drinking to show their joy. The daughters of Minoo Majidi, a mother shot dead by security services during the 2022 protests, shared a video of them raising a glass to President Raisi’s death.

    Dark humour – the jokes of an oppressed people – are circulating. “Mr Raisi, you surprised us. We have no tapas for our drinks,” chuckles one Iranian in a celebratory video on social media. There was the gag about how a Mossad agent called “Eli Copter” had caused the crash. People have handed out cakes and sweets in public squares – an act of symbolic importance in Persian culture, often associated with joyous events. Celebratory fireworks filled the skies in Iranian cities.

    Such courage is all the more impressive given how little Raisi’s death is likely to change anything in this closed prison of a society. It may somewhat alter the succession, since he had been one of the men tipped to succeed Khamenei, but the Ayatollahs retain their stranglehold. The bravery of anyone involved in any celebration or act of civil disobedience such as removing a headscarf, is astounding. Those letting off fireworks or handing out sweets are risking their lives.

    History will remember Raisi as a squalid tyrant who took a twisted pride in human suffering. He was involved in the torture and extrajudicial murder of thousands of political prisoners held in Iranian jails and the mass killings of opponents in 1988, when as many as 30,000 are believed to have lost their lives. As Mariam Memarsadeghi wrote in a chilling article for Tablet magazine, “virgins were systematically raped before their execution, to circumvent the Islamic prohibition on killing virgins and to prevent women and girls from reaching heaven”.

    And yet, the BBC posted about “President Ebrahim Raisi’s mixed legacy in Iran”. You can imagine the 1945 headlines about the mixed legacy of “motorway-builder, vegetarian rights enthusiast and dog-lover” Adolf Hitler, or that of “inspirational plus-size influencer” Hermann Goering. Reuters described how Raisi “rose through Iran’s theocracy from hardline prosecutor to uncompromising president, as he burnished his credentials to position himself to become the next supreme leader”.

    Reading such things you would think Raisi was, at worst, a slight renegade. A cheeky chappie in a kaftan whose loss will be felt by light entertainment for generations. They tweeted like he was Rod Hull – rather than, you know, someone nicknamed “the Butcher of Tehran”. But in the real world, faced with the real consequences of the regime he ran, people are dancing.

    It wasn’t just the BBC in its classic “tightrope walk” mode, either. Things were getting a bit Candle in the Wind at the UN, as the entire Security Council (including both the UK and US representatives) stood to observe a minute of silence for President Raisi. Goodbye Tehran’s rose.

    European Council president Charles Michel tweeted out his sincere condolences, while the “European Commissioner for Crisis Management” committed the EU’s Copernicus satellite system to help locate Raisi’s helicopter, in the name of “#EUSolidarity”.

    Lest we forget, Johan Floderus, a young EU official from Sweden, has been incarcerated at Iran’s notorious Evin prison for more than two years. We don’t see much “#EUSolidarity” coming from the other direction. Not to be undone, President Higgins of Ireland channelled the spirit of Eamon de Valera c.1945, by offering his “deepest sympathies” upon the death of a tyrant.

    Such statements go well beyond basic diplomacy. Nobody asked anyone to gush; they chose to. The message it sends is a slap in the face to those bravely putting their lives on the line for freedom. But it’s par for the course in what is (sometimes optimistically) termed the “international community”.

    Speaking of which, on Monday, the International Criminal Court put out joint bids for arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and the prime minister and defence minister of Israel. Given that the ICC has no jurisdiction, nor power of its own to arrest anyone, there was something bleakly comic about the manner of the announcement. Chief prosecutor Karim Khan delivered his statement flanked by a couple of glaring bureaucrats. The ICC appeared to be putting on its best “don’t mess with us” face. It looked like a geriatric version of Bugsy Malone.

    The ICC application refers, pointedly, to the “territory of Israel” and the “state of Palestine”, which makes it clear which side its bread is buttered. It notably ignores Hamas’s use of human shields, surely a factor when assessing the civilian death toll. It even holds Israel entirely responsible for “closing the three border crossing points” after October 7.

    Yet Hamas destroyed the Erez crossing, murdering its operators and blowing up the barriers separating it from the Gaza strip. Small wonder border checkpoints weren’t up and running immediately. Condemning Israel for this is grotesque; gaslighting on an international scale.

    The timing is also telling. We have known about the crimes of October 7 from day one, thanks to the body-cams Hamas terrorists so proudly wore to document their butchery. Yet the ICC waited until May 2024 to condemn both Israel and Hamas on the same day. The effect is to suggest a moral equivalence between a democratic state and a genocidal terrorist group that says it wants to repeat the atrocities of October 7 indefinitely. You don’t have to believe Israel is above criticism – and nor should we – to recognise this.

    Multinational organisations like the ICC are often held up as moral arbiters in themselves, when they will only be as virtuous or corrupt as their component member states, and reflecting the same biases. The World Health Organisation has long excluded Taiwan from its membership due to Chinese pressure. A ruinous decision, when Taiwan’s early warnings about the risks of human-to-human transmission of Covid in late 2019 were ignored. Something is rotten in the state of many international bodies and moral courage is in short supply.

    Given such a clear-cut case of evil as Raisi, the mealy-mouthed global response does not bode well. For genuine bravery, we can look to the people at the sharp end of such regimes. Because still, in the midst of it all, the women of Iran dance.”

    1. Any information that we only got via the media is suspect.

      It saddens me to see people even on this website hating on particular countries because it’s what they’ve been subconsciously programmed to do.
      People even still repeat the propaganda from the end of the last long economic cycle and its wars and that’s over 80 years old now!

    2. Thank you for posting this Anne. I was going to but you beat me to it.

    3. BBC criticised for ‘absurd’ obituary of ‘Butcher of Tehran’ Raisi

      Broadcaster says Iranian ‘mass killer’ left a ‘mixed legacy’, describing him as ‘the president of the unprivileged and poor’

      Joe Barnes • 21 May 2024 • 6:40pm

      The BBC is facing criticism for saying Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s hardline president who died in a helicopter crash, left a “mixed legacy”. An obituary published by the broadcaster described the former leader, who was confirmed dead on Monday, as a figure “loved by hardliners of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

      “President Ebrahim Raisi’s mixed legacy in Iran,” the BBC’s World Service’s social media post promoting the article read.

      Raisi earned a fearsome reputation as the “Butcher of Tehran” for his role on the so-called “death committee”, which ordered the execution of thousands of political opponents of the Islamic Republic’s regime, in the 1980s. He was subsequently elected president in 2021 in a vote considered by many as rigged because moderates and reformists had been barred from taking part.

      The BBC described him as “the president of the unprivileged and poor”, citing depictions by Iranian state media. Security minister Tom Tugendhat said the piece was “absurd”.

      The senior Conservative MP had earlier criticised Charles Michel, the European Council’s president, for offering Iran the EU’s “sincere condolences”.

      “I will not mourn him [Raisi],” Mr Tugendhat wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

      Gabriel Noronha, the US state department’s former Iran adviser, said the BBC should receive the “worst obituary award for noting Raisi’s leadership to ‘reform in processing a backlog of court cases'”.

      “Since 2021, when Raisi took office, the regime executed 1,844 Iranians, including huge numbers of dissidents and religious minorities, most in sham trials,” he added.

      The satirical Sunday Sport newspaper joked that the BBC would likely describe Adolf Hitler as an “often-controversial German statesman” in modern-day reporting of the Nazi leader’s death.

      X users also left community-generated notes on the BBC’s social media post highlighting Raisi’s role in the “mass murder and brutal torture of political dissidents”.

      The BBC’s coverage of Raisi’s death also included his role in enforcing Iran’s strict rules requiring women to cover their hair with a hijab or headscarf, as well as the brutal crackdown on demonstrations against the policy after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the “morality police”.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/21/bbc-absurd-obituary-butcher-tehran-raisi-iran-president/
      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crggd01jmx3o
      ______________________________________________________________________________________

      Ministers refuse to use tribute to Iranian president drawn up by Foreign Office staff

      Government instead says real tragedy is ‘brutal repression and murder’ under leadership of Ebrahim Raisi

      Daniel Martin, DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR and Joe Barnes, BRUSSELS CORRESPONDENT • 21 May 2024 • 6:44pm

      Civil servants in the The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office drew up a statement expressing condolences over the “tragedy”” of the death of the hard-line Iranian president – but ministers refused to use it…(and so on)…

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/21/british-un-security-council-ebrahim-raisi/

  40. The 20mph lark is to make getting around as difficult and expensive as possible. The pretence was it’s ‘green’ but the reasoning – as with all things green is a nonsense to suit the state – as all government dogwaffle is.

  42. Don’t forget building on flood plain and water run-offs. There’s a brand new place near us where they built on the side of a slope where the water is known to run off fields into the narrow valley river. New residents already complaining their brand new posh houses are in need of water protection. Also complaining that the pavement and zebra crossing to the main village and school leading from the houses is still not built despite it being a condition of planning application by the council for allowing the estate to go ahead. More global warming, I should think.

  44. Vile Venal Vennells “apologises”. Didn’t weep, though.. I wonder if that will come later when nasty questions are thrown at her….

    1. These people don’t tend to weep. The apology is through gritted teeth and is really for getting caught.

      1. This is really only the tip of the iceberg.This has come out. But how many conspiracies have been successfully covered up?

        1. If what I say doesn’t ring true, read the comment of Lord Denning, the darling of the legal establishment.
          He had expressed a similar controversial opinion regarding the Birmingham Six in 1988, saying: “Hanging ought to be retained for murder most foul. We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they’d been hanged. They’d have been forgotten, and the whole community would be satisfied … It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than that the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned.”

        2. Covered up or just unending defiance and denial until the next misdemeanor comes along to distract attention.

    2. She didn’t offer to return the bonus that she received for every successful prosecution that she engineeered.

    3. She did, eventually. There was a pause as her voice quavered. She then reached for a tissue.

      1. What a relief. I thought she had a heart of stone. Well, she does – but can still squeeze out crocodile tears…

      2. Not a lot of sympathy there – quite restores my faith in the British, or at least some of them!!

    5. Crocodile tears of self pity so far. The woman is venal but the KC is clinical.

      There are other over promoted women who fail upwards and Dido Harding springs immediately to mind along with the woman banker who targeted Nigel Farage and the woman who wrecked John Lewis.

    7. When everything she owns has been sold to add to the compensation scheme then justice will be done.

      Admittedly, there is not one person to blame here but that just means more get clobbered. It is wrong that some have lost everything while those responsible – not ‘guilty’, responsible – get away with it.

  45. One of the other senior women villains did – as did Mrs Murrell (in a different place)..

  46. THE LABOUR PARTY (A 20th Century Anachronism).

    Born under Keir Hardie. Let’s hope it dies under Keir Starmer.

  47. Following on from the letter about short prison sentences.

    Britain is a bad place to be law-abiding and decent

    The state’s power is turned against the honest citizen, while violent criminals are allowed to run amok

    SAM ASHWORTH-HAYES • 21 May 2024 • 6:03pm

    The American venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once observed that living in California was like living in late Rome: a civilisation flourishing on the surface, but one where “the roads are becoming unsafe and nobody is quite sure why”.

    It’s uncomfortably familiar. Britain is not exactly descending into lawlessness; on the contrary, laws continue to be passed and sometimes even enforced. But there is a sense that something is slipping out of control.

    A set of stories from the past week draws this out. In the first, a young father confronted a man using drugs and loitering near a children’s play park. His reward for this act of public service was to be brutally murdered. His killer has been convicted and is now awaiting sentencing.

    No length of time in prison will bring a dead father back, but a long sentence for a murderer might stop other children losing theirs. Studies around the world have shown that a small minority of repeat offenders are responsible for a staggering share of violent crime. Here, however, even criminals who are known to be “high risk” are being released early to fight overcrowding.

    Others may never be arrested at all. The idea of police patrols as a deterrent – providing the sort of public service the murdered man needed – now appears to be an historical oddity, and it is dispiritingly common for crimes to be reported, filed, and then ignored by forces far too overstretched to deal with lower-level offending.

    Even when they do intervene, they all too often find that the law, or at least the judges interpreting it, will take a different view. An officer who arrested a woman during a row over fare evasion has been found guilty of assault. For obvious reasons, the police, in turn, are losing confidence in their ability to actually carry out their jobs.

    For those living in London, we have an almost weekly demonstration of a world in which the police have practically given up. Nearly every weekend, the streets of the capital are taken over by protests that proclaim their support for Hamas and Islamism while officers watch on.

    The new report by Lord Walney on policing protests, and its suggestions for protecting democracy, is all well and good, but the High Court has just unpicked some of the few tools the police already had.

    Taken in isolation, these stories are dispiriting. In combination, they offer a bleak pattern. Britain’s authorities are abandoning the honest, the law-abiding and the decent to the consequences of decay. But as power slips from the state, it often turns what little it has left against that same law-abiding group.

    The pattern repeats across the board. Enter the country illegally, with nothing to offer it, or even pose an active threat to it, and you can expect to watch as the legal system bends over backwards to find a way to maintain your presence here, while the taxpayer funds your accommodation.

    Marry a foreign spouse, or work in a highly paid role for a company that then goes bankrupt, however, and watch as the Home Office puts you through hell.

    Work hard to provide a roof and prosperous lifestyle for your children, and the state will confiscate an ever larger share of your income to fund those who choose to raise their families reliant upon government largesse.

    The British state is increasingly incapable of fulfilling its most basic functions of preserving public order, maintaining the roads, and enforcing the law. Its survival seems to be based less on competence or moral legitimacy than on its ability to keep the naturally law-abiding in line, even as others run free.

    This, ultimately, is the core of the issue. The state can manage some disorder so long as everyone else plays along. It finds ways to route around it, avoiding major clashes and the sudden shift of narrative that would result from seeing just how deep the rot has set in. And it relies upon the compliance of the decent majority, without which it would topple overnight.

    The result is an absurd twisting of virtue, where criminals are fearless and the law binds only the lawful. The meek may well inherit the earth, but here and now Britain is being handed to the despicable.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/21/law-and-order-walney-report-crime-sentencing/

    1. We either need a tougher criminal code – including execution or to build more prisons where serial offenders are never released. Being honest, what right does a career criminal have to the norms of society?

    2. Nah, you need selective sentences like we have in Canada:

      Illegal immigrant? Conditional discharge because a conviction might lead to the offender being deported
      Persons of hue (formerly called back gits)? Reduced sentence because of cultural differences.
      First nations? Forget prison, you get a nice stay at a healing lodge.
      White man? Full term in prison.
      Whitey doing crime against non white? Lock him up for life and throw away the key.

    3. This was a depressingly accurate article. I was tempted to post it here then decided that someone else probably would and lo and behold!

  49. Rather late getting here , bit of a shock , Moh went off to play golf at 8am , then there was a knock on the door , the scrap metal bloke was here to take away an old oven that had been sitting in the garage for 20 years .

    Trouble was , I was still in my jim jams , nothing ventured nothing gained , it was drizzling with rain , I opened the garage door , and thought oh no, motorbike was in the way , he was annoyed and said he would come back in 2 weeks !

    Sorted a few domestic things out indoors , as well as getting dressed , started to really rain , then the plumber turned up as requested , because our water pressure is pathetic especially so in the kitchen and upstairs in the bathroom, we have a very complicated plumbing system which will cost a fortune to simplify ..

    He fiddled around with the taps and chattered on about infill and new homes in the village , and low pressure because of blah blah .

    He was here a while , now I’m £40 worse off , then just as he left , Moh turned up in his car because rain and the fear of lightening strikes ( his golf partners balked at the idea of carrying on with the game ).

    Weather is clearing up. 15c .

    PS , Just want to comment on the skill and bravery of the Boeing 777 pilot and crew , and the strength of the aircraft to withstand that horrific incident .

    Moh and I were on a flight from Joburg, took off in a Boeing 747, in a thunder storm , but a few hours later , must have been over the Congo, the aircraft was caught in severe turbulence .. so frightening , we prayed our hearts out , and clung to each other .. Good old work horse Boeings !

    1. I laughed a lot at this TB, absolutely no disrespect intended, but it reminded me (loosely) of the plot-line of one of those dreadful 70s soft porn films – there was always a plumber!!

  50. Call me more cynical than usual but WHAT is it about the women in “high places” who, when challenged about how useless/corrupt etc they are start weeping?

    Whom do they think they are fooling?

    1. Crocodile tears. You get this sort of thing from female murderers upset about getting found out.

    2. I expect when genuinely helpless cave woman got herself in a jam she found that tears on her pretty face inspired the protection of a nice strapping alpha male and the habit has outlived its original justification, as human behaviour often does.

      1. It was there ten minute ago when I went downstairs to the canteen to get lunch. Must have been deleted from Twitter. A black guy dragging a white guy out of his car and beating him up, if it was the post I think it was – or is that further down?

  52. Bad Blood
    All this hoo-hah about “We didn’t know that American blood might be bad” is pure BS.

    From 1969 to 1970 I was working in a big hospital in upstate New York. My wife worked in the Haematology lab.

    It was well known that if you were down and out and wanted to make a few bucks, you could get between $20 and $25 a pint (that’s when there were $4 to the pound, remember). So it was not at all surprising that druggies, drunks and down and outs would come by frequently to give blood.

    On returning to UK in 1970 I became a blood donor myself and after about 10 donations the Blood Transfusion Service put me on the Rare Donor Panel because of my unusual blood group. After that they don’t let you go.

    You have to stop giving when you reach 75 and I hoped to give my 75th Donation on my 75th birthday, but it was not to be ‘cos I got a chest infection.

    All you get in return for your blood in the UK is often a half hour or more wait (even with timed donations) a drink and a biscuit. After 25 and 50 donations I believe you used to get a trip up to Lunnon, but now you get a “silver” or “gold” pin.

    Only ‘good guys’ give blood in the UK. It is heavily tested too, by all accounts, so perhaps that’s why it is probably the very best available.

    1. I was always surprised the Germans used to pay me for my blood when i lived there – for the same reasons.

      1. MiR
        …for the same reasons. Did they think you were down and out? [ducks quickly]

        1. Gasoline – the Life Blood of the USA

          I was tidying up my Office/Bedroom on Sunday when I chanced upon my 1969/70 Diary – the one I had when my wife and I were working in a hospital upstate New York.

          I had bought a wreck of a car for US$200 (that’s 50 quid at US$4.00 to the pound as it was then). One entry sticks out: ‘put 16.2 gallons of Hess gasoline at 30.9 cents a gallon makes US$5.00’ (or £1.25 for SIXTEEN GALLONS!). How things have changed.

          I was a Post-Graduate on a salary of US$7,000 a year. It sounded good before I left for the USA, but when I discovered that the guy who was pushing broom in the hallways was on just under US$6,000 I felt different. That’s one reason why my wife got a job in the Haematology Lab (see my earlier Bad Blood post)..

          1. When I was a student in the late ’60s, early ’70s, I ran a Mini. Petrol was 6/8 a gallon.

        2. Gasoline – the Life Blood of the USA

          I was tidying up my Office/Bedroom on Sunday when I chanced upon my 1969/70 Diary – the one I had when my wife and I were working in a hospital upstate New York.

          I had bought a wreck of a car for US$200 (that’s 50 quid at US$4.00 to the pound as it was then). One entry sticks out: ‘put 16.2 gallons of Hess gasoline at 30.9 cents a gallon makes US$5.00’ (or £1.25 for SIXTEEN GALLONS!). How things have changed.

          I was a Post-Graduate on a salary of US$7,000 a year. It sounded good before I left for the USA, but when I discovered that the guy who was pushing broom in the hallways was on just under US$6,000 I felt different. That’s one reason why my wife got a job in the Haematology Lab (see my earlier Bad Blood post)..

        3. Gasoline – the Life Blood of the USA

          I was tidying up my Office/Bedroom on Sunday when I chanced upon my 1969/70 Diary – the one I had when my wife and I were working in a hospital upstate New York.

          I had bought a wreck of a car for US$200 (that’s 50 quid at US$4.00 to the pound as it was then). One entry sticks out: ‘put 16.2 gallons of Hess gasoline at 30.9 cents a gallon makes US$5.00’ (or £1.25 for SIXTEEN GALLONS!). How things have changed.

          I was a Post-Graduate on a salary of US$7,000 a year. It sounded good before I left for the USA, but when I discovered that the guy who was pushing broom in the hallways was on just under US$6,000 I felt different. That’s one reason why my wife got a job in the Haematology Lab (see my earlier Bad Blood post)..

    2. I got a pin after I’d given 10 pints, I think. I used to get a small certificate to put in a folder after each donation.

  54. Middle class shoppers are falling for an online scam by fraudsters masquerading as Cornish fashion company Seasalt – despite the fake site spelling the county’s name ‘Cornwoll’.
    A slew of mums have admitted they fell for the scam after clicking on a link they saw on Facebook, which then led them to the knock-off clothing website.
    The page – incorrectly spelled seasaltcornwoll.com – used images from the real Seasalt site and sales of up to 80 per cent off to draw hapless buyers in. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/…/Middle-class-shoppers…

    1. What twerps. M&S stock the Seasalt collection. Nice cotton print dresses and tops and good quality. Why risk online shopping when you can try them on in Marks?

  55. Turbulence
    I am flying to Portugal tomorrow. As I got my Private Pilot’s Licence 66 years ago in rather bumpy Tiger Moth biplanes, I ALWAYS keep my seat belt done up, albeit loosely (unless I’m off to pump the bilges on a long flight). I’ll bet most of the other passengers in the FULL aircraft will have their belts done up too. I will keep an eye open for Darwin types who don’t.

    1. According to MSN the seat belt sign had been switched on. Those passengers who had ignored the sign

      were thrown around the cabin, endangering those already seated and buckled in.

    2. I haven’t done a great deal of flying but there have been two memorably bumpy rides. One was setting off from Pittsburgh in heavy rain and a storm that persisted all the way up the Eastern Seaboard and only calmed down when we reached Newfoundland. The other was coming home from Cyprus in the early hours of the morning. On the latter occasion there was fork lightning flashing around the wings and when we finally came down over the Thames, the pilot told us it was the worst flight he’d ever had. He’d tried to take us above or below the storm but couldn’t get out of it. On both journeys I clung to my seat, as well as having the belt fastened and said the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary out loud. No-one gave me any funny looks or reprimands.

  56. A metaphor…

    British bees ‘too scared to go out’ because of Asian hornet threat

    Native populations risk being wiped out by foreign predator that can destroy beehives

    Alex Barton • 21 May 2024 • 5:48pm

    Asian hornets are leaving British bees too scared to go out, beekeepers have warned.

    A third of the native population could be wiped out because they fear leaving their nests owing to the invasive foreign predator, according to the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA). There was a record number of Asian hornet nests discovered in the UK last year. A total of 72 were destroyed, marking a significant rise in the population of the species. Since 2016, only 85 nests have been discovered. The BBKA said this growth represented a threat to the continued existence of native bees.

    Asian hornets have black bodies and the ends of their legs are yellow, compared with the British species which is smaller and yellower. The animals pose no threat to human health but can destroy native honey beehives and populations.

    Ian Campbell, spokesman for British Beekeepers Association, told The Telegraph: “A conservative estimate of British bee losses would be about 30 per cent, but it could be much worse. Bees become too scared to go out because they know there is a predator around and they don’t function in the way they usually would.

    “They don’t bring in the stores they usually would, the queen and colony don’t build to their usual size, which is called ‘colony paralysis’. And because of this, they don’t survive the winter. We are looking at significant losses of British bees.”

    He added: “We are urging the public to keep an eye out for them [hornets] and report sightings. The National Bee Unit is then putting boots on the ground to eradicate them.”

    Mr Campbell said there had been a number of sightings this year already and that DNA tests some of this year’s hornets are related to those from last year. He said this was a sign they were becoming established in the UK, adding: “This is very concerning. Once they are established, eradication becomes very difficult. There are concerns there may have been hornet queens raised in the UK already.”

    Scientists at Defra’s Animal and Plant Health Agency are trying to determine if any of last year’s Asian hornets managed to stay in the UK over the winter by setting up traps in the South-East and North Yorkshire. Eight Asian hornet nests have so far been spotted in 2024, with five in East Sussex, two in Kent and one in east London.

    Sarah Dines, the MP for Derbyshire Dales, said many of her constituents had voiced concerns about the species sweeping the country. She said: “The majority of beekeeping is small scale and many of my constituents are very worried. They have concerns the hornets will sweep across the country and are heading towards the Midlands.”

    Ms Dines is trying to raise awareness of the issue in order to keep the population of British bees and the wider ecosystem healthy. She said: “It is essential that we keep healthy native bees and guard against the horrors of this foreign predator. Without natural pollinators how do we produce food for the nation? They will also eat any kind of insect and they will have knock-on effects to our ecosystem.”

    Ms Dines added: “It is important that people take notice of these hornets and are aware of the threat to our pollinators’ these fierce predators represent. We need a sensible level of vigilance to keep our honey.”

    Nicola Spence, Defra’s chief plant and bee health officer professor, said: “By ensuring we are alerted to possible sightings as early as possible, the public can help us take swift and effective action to stamp out the threat posed by Asian hornets.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/21/british-bees-too-scared-to-go-out-because-of-asian-hornets/

    1. “Asian hornets have black bodies and the ends of their legs are yellow, compared with the British species which is smaller and yellower. ”

      The DT picture shows the European hornet as larger than the Asian one. An excellent metaphor though.

    2. I’m ruminating on the notion of bees being scared. Are they that sentient?

      1. They think a lot…

        They are clever enough to extract pollen from a range of flowers and flap their wings at the speed of sound (or similar) but can’t find their way out of a room with open doors and windows!

    4. Asian bee species have developed a defence against this aggressive hornet. The bees entice the hornet scout into the hive/nest and then mob it until it dies from the heat generated by being completely encased in a mass of bees. If the scout doesn’t return to its nest it cannot indicate to the other hornets where the bee nest is. British bees do not have this defence mechanism and are therefore extremely vulnerable to this vicious predator.

      Another unwanted alien species that found its way to the UK. I don’t suppose that we’ll ever discover how.

  57. Yer French have given the two murdered prison officers a state funeral. Normally, Toy Boy Macron presides – he lurves showing grief and being presidential at the same time. But he has had to leave the country to try to stop the civil war in New Caledonia. So HIS Toy Boy – little Gabriel Attal – has had to do the honours. Trouble is, he looks about 15 and doesn’t have an impressive voice. Gives the impression of a lower VIth former called on to do something that is too much for him.

    Still – he is a pretty boy…..

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/41800f28c3159c25bf9aabc40c8f5f6edd338d4c65aa3a26cde8e5c4bc2b2c91.jpg

    1. Surely he must be using Gillette INTIMATE™ because of his recently acquired public profile:

      This is a range of products that helps to groom the most intimate parts of your body, including your pubic hair. Our intimate hair removal range comes with some notable technology that has been engineered to help men keep their groin and public area …

      https://www.gillette.co.uk/intimate/all-products.list

  60. Yet another torrential downpour during a prolonged spell of rainfall that hasn’t ceased in more than 24 hours.

          1. Of course, Wibbles. Had you or I done that – it would have been rejected out of hand. And scorned. But because a black person is responsible – it is acclaimed.

            Draw whatever conclusion you like….

      1. She may have commissioned it but has the Duchess of Sussex any friends?

    3. There’s something going on there but I suspect that it’s personal not political.

    6. It is quite awful.
      At least the comments saved me a trip to the opticians.

  62. Putin has ‘both eyes’ on Gotland, warns Sweden’s army chief. 22 May 2022.

    Russian leader Vladimir Putin has his eyes on the Swedish island of Gotland, warned Sweden’s defense chief Micael Bydén.

    Gotland, Sweden’s largest island and comparable in size to the smallest U.S. state of Rhode Island, is strategically located in the middle of the Baltic Sea — between Stockholm and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.

    Another stupid scare story. A few year ago the Swedes used to complain perpetually that Russian Subs were invading their home waters. One even reported sighted from the deck of a ferry. Needless to say none were ever found.

    https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-putin-eyes-sweden-gotland-baltic-sea-army-chief/

    1. ” Needless to say none were ever found.” – well, they were under water, Minty….!

      1. What a strange place to hide them.

        No wonder the Government could never track them down.

      1. On 22 April 1808, during the Finnish War between Sweden and Russia, a Russian army landed on the southeastern shores of Gotland near Grötlingbo. Under command of Nikolai Andreevich Bodisko 1,800 Russians took the city of Visby without any combat or engagement, and occupied the island. A Swedish naval force rescue expedition was sent from Karlskrona under the command of admiral Rudolf Cederström with 2,000 men; the island was liberated and the Russians capitulated. Russian forces left the island on 18 May 1808.

        Obviously not a convincing claim.

        1. Of course it is only the pseudonym of that A Allan bloke who pontificates BTL on the Telegraph.

  66. David Cameron is returning early from a trip to Albania so he can attend this afternoon’s Cabinet meeting – adding to mounting speculation that Rishi Sunak could call a summer general election.

    The Foreign Secretary was in Tirana to discuss immigration policy, but he has cut short his visit so he can attend the meeting in Downing Street at around 4pm.

    A source at the Foreign Office claimed they did not know what the Cabinet would be discussing.

    Meanwhile, Grant Shapps has delayed a flight to the Baltic states for two hours so he can attend Cabinet.

    The Defence Secretary is travelling to Estonia and Lithania to attend a Nato meeting about the Russian threat.

    Mr Sunak refused to rule out a summer general election when he was asked at Prime Minister’s Questions at lunchtime. The premier would only repeat his familiar line that there will be a contest “in the second half of this year”.

    You can follow the latest updates below and join the conversation in the comments section here.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/05/22/rishi-sunak-latest-news-pmqs-inflation-keir-starmer-tories/

      1. I find your comment most unkind. They didn’t always look like that. They have been with Le Gavroche for 20 years and take their roles very seriously. They are a favourite with the regulars also because of their attention to detail and loyalty to the Roux’s.

        1. Phizzee

          I am not often unkind , but as I have never had the opportunity to eat at Le Gavroche, if given the opportunity , I never will.

          Regarding rudeness young man , you are a fine one to talk , your piercing wit and retorts far out weigh my observations, yes?

          2. You will never have the opportunity of dining at Le Gavroche, Maggie.

            It closed its doors for good last January.

  68. UK accuses China of providing ‘lethal aid’ to Russia for Ukraine war. 22 May 2022.

    UK defence secretary Grant Shapps has accused China of providing or preparing to provide Russia with “lethal aid” for use by Moscow in its war against Ukraine.

    “Today I can reveal that we have evidence that Russia and China are collaborating on combat equipment for use in Ukraine,” Shapps told a defence conference in London on Wednesday.

    The defence secretary said new US and British intelligence showed “lethal aid is now or will be flowing from China to Russia and into Ukraine”, which Shapps said was “a significant development”.

    It must be more of those refrigerator chips. Shapps is a member of a polity where shameless lying is the norm.

    https://www.ft.com/content/44ad9fc5-6ccf-47f0-b075-8bef0a9a1cd9

    1. FFS I suppose all the Artillery and missiles we’ve been gifting Ukeland are “Non-Lethal” aid
      I despair I really do

    2. New UK Government slogan – “Hypocrites are Us”? You’re welcome, no fee this time!

    1. For some reason Lefties are drawn to abusing children. Wanting to normalise it is just … well, there’s something wrong mentally with such creatures.

  70. Households should stock up on tinned food, bottled water and a battery-powered or wind radio to prepare for a national emergency.

    The Government on Wednesday launched a new website, prepare.campaign.gov.uk, which sets out guidance for the public to prepare for crises. Flooding is warned to be the most common risk for the public, with other emergencies to prepare for including anything from another pandemic to a mass cyberattack that cuts off the internet. Extreme cases could include a nuclear attack in Europe or a volcanic eruption in another country sweeping clouds of highly toxic sulphur dioxide to the UK.

    1. “Make sure you have a dining table large enough for all the family to shelter beneath”

      1. ,,,and also have fly swats handy – particularly in some area of Narfolk.

        1. You’re better in a inner terraced house than in a detached one (protect and survive).

    2. “Consider what supplies you and your household might need during an emergency lasting a few days, such as a power cut or water outage, or situations where you are advised to stay at home or to leave your home for safety reasons.”

      Oh dear, what have they got in store for us?

        1. Makes you wonder if an “emergency government” will be in place by the time the election is about to be called.

      2. “The Government’s national risk register identifies 100 threats, from flooding (high likelihood but lower impact) to a conflict (high impact but low likelihood) at the top of the scale and pandemic (high likelihood and high impact).”

        Obviously another Plandemic then, judging by that extract from the piece.

        Really, these people are just idiots. He went on to blether about “the British stiff upper lip” too 🙄 Hasn’t he noticed that much of Britain’s populace now hates the country, so there’ll be no stiffness of upper lip about it. Quite the opposite.

      1. Have you read the national food strategy? It doesn’t mention growing food.

        The same for the energy security policy – it involved reducing energy use by destroying energy production.

        The government is deliberately forcing all these issues. They are NOT external. They’re the direct result of state policy – net zero, specifically.

          1. By forcing cattle out there will be less meat as well – all part of net zero. All part of forcing socialism.

            The entire state machine is a complete failure. Net zero is just the latest gormless policy. Every stupid thing those fools do makes us poorer. The solution isn’t merely tax cuts or reduced spending it is massive reform: a complete overhaul of how state employees are paid in the first place. A complete halt and repeal of all legislation from the last 50 years.

        2. Indeed. So part of my food security strategy involves growing my own food, collecting seeds etc!

          1. So does mine, but I think the government has sent a detachment of slugs to ensure I don’t succeed 🙁 I noticed a thrush on the garden path this morning. Why isn’t it doing its job?

        3. Good point. Where’s the “dig for Britain” campaign when we supposedly need it?

        4. I noticed that Net Zero is now tagged on to the end of a govt. department. No doubt with loads of extra civil serpents (sic) to administer it.

    5. I wouldn’t put it past these morons to start a Nuclear War though that said you should be prepared already.

    7. Just trying to keep you on edge.Ensure you do not comply. Live a private life and do not become involved in your local area if you do not want to. They want you in groups, single targets are harder to hit.

    8. Scare tactics, with the ultimate aim of scaring folk into accepting more control and less freedom Belle.

      1. Afternoon Tom. The 77 Brigade Trolls are out in full force on the Telegraph Comments. They are bigging up the Nuclear War is OK narrative.

        patrick lucas.

        Putin’s nuclear bluster is just so pathetic. Does he really think that we’ll say “oh well it’s a fair cop, we give in”.
        Delusional small man.

        Just a taster.

        1. Yes. The war drums beat ever louder. Both sides are talking about using nukes. But the side more likely to use them is the losing side, and at the moment that is the US and Nato. But those banging the drum need to stop and think. A nuclear exchange is likely to leave a couple of hundred million dead in the first hour. And they will be the lucky ones.

    9. That’s one way to stimulate the economy, I suppose, although it hardly chimes with the environmentalist call to use less. As for a battery-powered or wind[-up] radio, I barely listen to radio as things are.

      1. tch tch David that is more important than food or water – you MUST get your government propaganda in an emergency!

        1. Assuming that is a straightforward question – though I cannot help feeling that it’s rhetorical – I barely listen to either, although digital is the more likely of the two.

  71. Ooh…a bun fight…

    I don’ think i could ever be accused of calling someone ghoulish looking. If i didn’t know better i would have said they were either librarians or academics.

    I think i just heard a sharp retort. :@)

  73. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/22/ftse-100-markets-latest-news-uk-cpi-inflation-figures-ons/

    I wonder if anyone else ever works out the real world debt interest government pays against the real debt owed and as a result the real deficit?

    The state is borrowing £800m a day. Every day. Much of that goes into debt interest payments. The figures are staggering. The government is borrowing on the credit card to pay off the interest – only the interest – on the loans it’s taken out.

    Worse, the loans are in our name.

    1. “Worse, the loans are in our name.”
      But the index linked pensions and sinecures are in their names.

  74. It finally stopped raining after about 25-26 hours but the sky is darkening once more.

      1. Still wall-to-wall blue skies here for the 12th consecutive day (he said with a smug smirk on his physog).😊

          1. As the rain falls here, the local forecast says, “It’ll stay dry now…”

        2. Malmo is going to fall before London…Just sayin’….
          Teach you for impugning my chips !

          2. Fries are skinny chips !
            You are not going to be impressed with what i am doing tomorrow. Noisette of lamb. All the bone and most of the fat removed !
            The bone and fat reduced to a jus then orange zest and honey added.

          4. I would say that was very ‘Gammon’ …
            What happened to the pineapple slice and maraschino cherry?

            I still like that

          5. Fruit is full of sugar.

            My favourite way with gammon steak is with mashed spuds, parsley sauce, mushrooms, broad beans and a tomato.

          7. A wise man knows that a tomato is a fruit; but a fool puts it in a fruit salad.

    2. Without wishing to state the obvious. As long as we keep letting followers of this religion into this country, women and girls will not be safe. End of. #rop

    3. I may have posted this before but this is the sort of histrionics that people like the wonderful woman above have to put up with. Dialogue is impossible with such awful people. Let’s hope that she keeps safe.

      The lady hosting this video is Hatun Tash who was attacked and stabbed by an Islamist. Fortunately she is fine.

      Muslim Sheikhs In Tears On TV Over Apostasy In Pakistan!
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zhgehLttUk&t=2s

      2. Could be a meeting of Nottlers, calling for death, damnation and deportation of our favourite targets.

    4. She has not quite understood that the bad muslims are indoctrinated by teachings of the religion and are not just bad individuals. Thus the ideology must be called out for what it is.

    5. In the light of apostasy in the Religion of Peace I have a great deal of admiration for this woman. You can see her enquiring mind at work, which pulls her back from getting emotionally overwhelmed, good stuff dear lady on YouTube. Her focus right now is on the authoritarianism within Islam. Whilst I am concerned by the “doing good in the world” thinking, as opposed to don’t make the world any worse, I am getting a sense she will eventually discover that Neo-Marxism is the other solvent that has been ubiquitously poured all over the UK in the past 30 years leading to the grief she is currently enduring.

    1. I can understand Pedro Sanchez, brought up in a Catholic culture and whose heritage encompasses the Holy Inquisition. I can understand the Irishman, in whose fair city resides the current head of the Provisional IRA, watching and waiting. But how does one comprehend the Norwegian guy? Would he be hoping to sell more explosives?

    2. And when a bunch of crazed Islamists demand a sizeable chunk of Ireland, Spain or Norway after murdering and raping hundreds of citizens will those craven morons offer recognition?

    3. The Swift banking system recognises it for IBAN numbers. It’s possible to have a bank account in a state that has never existed.

    4. I wonder how much time those “leaders” spent time talking to “Zeee Jooooooze” of Israel and asking them their take on all of this.

  77. Also, I see BBC Radio 4’s “flagship topical programme “any questions”” is at the ICAEW (Chartered Accountants) on 16th August. Sadly I am sticking pins in my eyes that night.

    1. I know the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales well. I worked with the architects for the alterations to the original Belcher & Joass buildings, the continuation of the stone facades on Great Swan Alley terminating in a neo-Belcher portal on Copthall Avenue and the Entrances to the inserted offices and The Great Hall.

      In the great tradition of architects employing artists and craftsmen to furnish or decorate, the Great Hall has over the years has been adorned with paintings by John Piper, a tapestry by Eduardo Paolozzi and craftsman metalwork by James Horrobin.

      The floors of the new inserted building are suspended from massive beams sitting on four rectangular columns. The foundation is a cellular raft which contains an underground river (The Walbrook).

      1. It is a lovely building, completely ruined by the Woke prats that work there and the ghastly Pride++++ flag they fly.

  79. Sky news allegedly states a general election on 4th July .
    Not sure if this is correct but they’ve stated that date.

    1. Sunak doing a runner before the increasing piles of excrement are fed into the whirring blades?

    2. Yes lass, Sunak did the announcement in pouring rain which soaked his suit – I wonder if it will shrink further?

  80. The political scene in the USA is warming up.

    Florida District Judge, Aileen Cannon, has released information that the FBI group that raided Trump’s Mar-a-Largo residence had been granted permission to use lethal force if necessary; had a combat medical member in attendance; had the capacity to triage any injured person(s)
    and had maps issued that indicated a trauma centre 18 miles away.

    Did they expect Trump’s Secret Service bodyguards to open fire on the heavily armed FBI team? This was a raid on a former POTUS’s home, secured by a Secret Service squad, not a re-run of the gunfight at the OK Corral.

    What were the people responsible for authorising this raid thinking of?

  81. I looked at my email inbox a while ago and discovered dozens of notifications from Disqus, each telling me of a reply on Not The Telegraph Letters on today’s page. Upon closer examination it seems they began at about the time that I was obliged to log back on to Disqus after finding I had been logged off. As more and more continued to pour into my inbox, it transpired that each one was a notification of a new comment having been posted this afternoon. As a temporary measure, I directed all Disqus emails into my junk folder, then went back to Disqus to see if a setting had changed. I looked at email notifications and one box ticked was to receive a welcome message when commenting on a Disqus site for the first time. That proved not to be responsible. No other email box was ticked other than the main option of receiving emails from Disqus, of which the welcome message and others are sub-options. In order not to be deluged by emails I switched off the main one and now they have stopped. Anyway, I mention this to alert you to the possibility that others of you might also be unwittingly receiving dozens and dozens of Disqus emails because of a settings glitch. If you are, and would rather not, you’d best examine your Disqus email settings and change them to your preferred requirements.

    1. Similar problems here though not Disqus. My New Outlook account has gone haywire David. I have switched it back and it seems better.

    2. I turned off Disqus emails years ago – they are quite unnecessary – you can just use the blob at the top on the right for notifications.

    3. I turned off Disqus emails years ago – they are quite unnecessary – you can just use the blob at the top on the right for notifications.

  82. A jumped-up Par Four?

    Wordle 1,068 4/6
    🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
    🟨⬜⬜🟨🟨
    🟩🟩⬜🟨🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Me too.

      Wordle 1,068 4/6

      🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜
      ⬜⬜🟨🟨🟩
      ⬜🟨🟩⬜🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      1. Wordle 1,068 5/6

        🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜
        ⬜🟨🟩⬜🟨
        ⬜🟨🟩🟨⬜
        🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
        🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Better than me – Bogey here! PS despite other people moaning about it, I rather like your cryptic comments!

      Wordle 1,068 5/6

      🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
      🟩🟨🟩🟨⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  83. It appears that the Venal Vennells was willing to spend lots of taxpayers’ money in order to receive her bonus for every successful prosecution.

    From MSN:

    Earlier this month former managing director Alan Cook told the inquiry Ms Vennells approved legal costs of £300,000 to prosecute Mr Castleton for a supposed £25,000 shortfall when she was a network director at the Post Office.

    1. …but she was just one of the sleazebags involved.

      Fortunately the PTB will never agree to the prosecution of one of their own, so she’s safe.

      1. Fortunate for her! She’s doing a nice line in the “I have no recollection” stakes, with a side order of crocodile tears! I’m not a vindictive person [said he, lying through his teeth] but she, and others, should be in prison for this saga of lies and cover-up!

        1. Though she “apologised” to Alan Bates, she later:

          “….described campaigner Alan Bates’ accusations of blame against the Post Office after Mr Griffiths’ death as being ‘unhelpful’ and claimed his language directed at Post Office staff, accusing them of ‘thuggery’, was ‘extreme’.

    2. …but she was just one of the sleazebags involved.

      Fortunately the PTB will never agree to the prosecution of one of their own, so she’s safe.

  86. Further down the road The labour party have turned the sound up. Almost drowning him out.

    1. Well I do hope so. They’ll be too busy to organise a Plandemic and lockdown at least. Rishi will be trying to convince us he’s tamed inflation and that Rwanda is working while his back benchers can plot a vote of no confidence to try and stop him. Many won’t have organised their next sinecures as yet, I would think.

      Keeps them all out of my hair for a month or two while they run around like headless chickens.

      1. I have to admit, that I have never felt so detached from politics.
        And I have been a Conservative activist and have held various local offices since the mid 1970s.
        I am aware of what is at stake, but I am disenfranchised: and fear for my grandchildren’s future.

        2. It really doesn’t matter which you vote for. We are in a time where politics is just a monoculture of politically fashionable suits. Lab will promise the same as Con, because in the end they’re of one mind and as you imply, both just want your cross on the paper. They certainly aren’t up for representing us.

    3. Ahh, that’s why we will need a torch and wind up radio soon. Maybe need to up-rate the food storage to a 5 year stock and order gallons of mind numbing alcohol.

      1. I don’t blame you Bill. I shall probably, despite all my previous announcements, not do so either. That country that I was born into is no more.

        1. Absolutely Minty. I am also thoroughly discombobulated. And, living in Scotland, disenfranchised. What a blooming mess.

      2. I don’t blame you Bill. I shall probably, despite all my previous announcements, not do so either. That country that I was born into is no more.

      4. I hope that you will at least have the decency to present yourself and spoil your ballot in an appropriate way

    2. They couldn’t even be bothered to get him a brolly? Then the rodent comes bounding back in – after changing his shirt and tie – and tells us how amazing things are when… they’re not. They’re worse than ever. He has done nothing to earn my vote and has done everything to push me away.

      Voting for Starmer is pointless. He believes in nothing whatsoever. He’s a political weathervane and certainly doesn’t want what’s good for this country in any way shape or form. Raynor is a crook, Reeves has never done anything outside of theoretical economic playgrounds and is wedded to the same failed Keynesian twaddle as the Treasury has pushed for the last 30 years. Abbott is a moron. Lammy not far behind an especially thick cabbage.

      Voting Lib dem is an act of insanity, the green party are already in office so what’s the point of voting?

      I either vote reform or I don’t. Thing is, Reform, even if they won a massive majority will be fighting every arm of the state, every fake charity, quango and Lefty waster going and will make no headway whatsoever to implement their policies.

      Our entire system of government does not work. The whole thing needs to be torn down, ripped apart and a democracy imposed that serves those paying/who paid for the damned thing, not the dross troughing from it.

  90. Farage promised an answer.. I reckon he’ll go for it, then do the Trump campaign in the autumn.

    2. He’s been sitting on that pot for so long, I reckon he’s stuck to it.

  91. Q: What does calling a General Election for early July rather than (say) late-October signify?

    A: That far from any further fiscal easing (tax falls, spending increases) being feasible, fiscal tightening is on the horizon.

    PS. Gosh, he’s called the election before there’s been a single cut in the BoE lending rate …. must have decided he wants to be in California by the end of the year.

    1. By the end of summer. Children to start school mid-August in California. And his job starts on 5 July….

    2. To save the embarrassment of the Rwanda flights remaining on the ground in July.

      1. More like it. Things are obviously ready to take more of a dive than I’d thought.

    3. Pay note to the latest government deficit figures. That’s the significant issue – no room for tax cuts.

  92. So it looks like Reform are getting so popular that Rishi had to call the election so Labour could win and keep an establishment party in power.

  96. Just making a list of the useless women in very highly paid jobs who have made a hash of it:

    Venal Vennells; “Dido” Harding; Sharon White; Alison Rose; Jenny Harries….(just off the top of my head..)

    (Not saying that there are not some truly awful men, of course)

          4. Made it work properly. Before she arrived it was taking months to get a passport. When she left, it was taking four days.

    1. Of course. The media will be preening itself and foaming at the mouth by now

    2. It will be very interesting to see what the impartial Beeb gets up to at a time when it is even more obliged to give equal weight to its darlings and to the Far Right (hahahaha)

  99. That’s me for this wet day. Venal Vennells weeping crocodile tears; slagging off Mr Bates. Fishi committing suicide. All too much for my pore brane.

    Have a jolly evening trying to distinguish the policies of the likely candidates in your constituency.

    A demain

    2. Rishi obviously thought that the Vennells confessions are going to implicate yet more senior Tories.

      Very wise to put a smokescreen down now.

    3. Spent my early adulthood under Labour. Hated it. The sense of relief when they were booted out and we had a Conservative government (well, a coalition with the Lib Dems, anyway)! The utter sense of disappointment and betrayal in the 14 years since. And now the prospect of another Labour government. Beam me up, Scottie! I want out of here.

    4. He’ll soon be gambolling in the US!

      (But will he be proctoring as well after suffering such a white wash?)

  101. ”Guten morgen, my little Rishi, is Klaus.. ”

    ”Oh good morning, Herr Schwab, how kind of you to spend your extremely valuable time calling your adoring and obedient puppet, little me. How can I help you today, Sir?”

    ”Call a General Election!”

    ”Yes, of course, Herr Schwab, it will be done!”

    1. Hello Polly. I understand that the Evil Emperor Blair is set to take over from the Evil Emperor Schwab as World ArchTyrant. What is your opinion on that?

      1. I could have been the 3rd of June.
        We might all be jumping off the bridge..

      2. More likely the day of the Kronstad sailors marching on Petrograd.

        Now you can understand what your future is.

  104. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled)List

    SOMETHING TO OFFEND EVERYONE

    What is the difference between a Harley and a Hoover?
    The position of the dirt bag.

    Why is divorce so expensive?
    Because it’s worth it.

    What do you call a smart blonde?
    A golden retriever.

    What do lawyers use for birth control?
    Their personalities.

    What’s the difference between a girlfriend and wife?
    20 kgs.

    What’s the difference between a boyfriend and husband?
    45 minutes.

    What’s the fastest way to a man’s heart?
    Through his chest with a sharp knife.

    Why do men want to marry virgins?
    They can’t stand criticism.

    Why is it so hard for women to find men that are sensitive, caring, and good-looking?
    Because those men already have boyfriends.

    What’s the difference between a new husband and a new dog?
    After a year, the dog is still excited to see you.

    What makes men chase women they have no intention of marrying?
    The same urge that makes dogs chase cars they have no intention of driving.

    A brunette, a blonde, and a redhead are all in Grade 9. Who has the biggest boobs?
    The blonde, because she’s 18.

    What’s the difference between a porcupine and a BMW?
    A porcupine has the pricks on the outside.

    What did the blonde say when she found out she was pregnant?
    ‘Are you sure it’s mine?’

    Why do men find it difficult to make eye contact?
    Breasts don’t have eyes.

    What would you call it when an Italian has one arm shorter than the other?
    A speech impediment.

    What’s the difference between a Chinese zoo and an English zoo?
    A Chinese zoo has a description of the animal on the front of the cage along with a recipe.

    How do you get a sweet little 80-year-old lady to say the F….. Word?
    Get another sweet little 80-year-old lady to yell “BINGO”!

    What’s the difference between a northern USA fairy-tale and a southern USA fairy-tale?
    A Northern fairy-tale begins ‘Once upon a time.’
    A Southern fairy-tale begins ‘Y’all ain’t gonna believe this shiiit’.

    Why is there no Disneyland in China?
    No one’s tall enough to go on the good rides.

    Sorry chums this is tomorrow’s List, I lost track of time.

    Look out for a repeat tomorrow

      1. One of Matt’s best (there are so many) is of one guards horse saying to another: “it’s bad enough being black, but when they find out I’m gay…”

  107. Just sent Reform a bullseye,
    Well someone had to.
    It might buy a few leaflets
    That’s my election done

    2. Well done, Bob, I’ll be out with a lot of leafleting to do in the next couple of weeks. I asked our SE Cornwall candidate whether there was plan if Sunak called an early one and he didn’t know of one. He did say that N Farage needs to sober up and commit totally to Reform for the next 6 weeks. I agree.

  108. This is what all those woke student types camping out to protest for the Palestinians are supporting.

  109. The utter relief when the Thatcher government was elected… better than sex, so it was, and I was only 18 (times a night)

    1. Not quite old enough to remember Thatcher. But I did read her book, Statecraft. Like a manual for government, she got everything right, except for Turkey in NATO. No-one in modern politics even comes close.

      1. I admired her for her sticking to the plan, and that she’d said that putting the place back together after the Labour catastrope, was going to take time, and be hard and painful. Told it like it was going to be – and turned out. She’d also got a few good ‘yns to guard her back – Norman Tebbit, for example.

    1. I guess that’s the way most go, or liver problems, or heart failure.
      RIP, man. The first Olympian I ever watched, and admired.

      1. Actually, after being a bit flip, that’s really sad. Brought a tear to the eye, so it did.

    2. Wilkie was the first of a succession of British champions at breaststroke. I remember well his Olympic campaign in 1976. He lost in his favoured 100m to the American, John Hencken, but gained revenge in Hencken’s favourite discipline, the 200m.

      He was followed by other British greats at breaststroke, including Duncan Goodhew, Adrian Moorhouse and, lately, Adam Peaty.

  112. It has been observed elsewhere that university students will be back in their own constituencies and not able to vote in their temporary places of residence.

    They could further influence the vote during the fortnight before the election by demonstrating or, hopefully, rioting in favour of all things internationalist and culturally Marxist. It will be good to see the Labour crowd wriggling on that hook.

  113. That statement by Sunak just encapsulated how utterly sodding useless this Government is – Did nobody think to provide an umbrella? Did nobody think to shut up the clown who was playing ‘Things can only get better’ at 100db?
    I’m nervous now as the comparative good news about inflation, and presumably interest rates, will take a few months to translate to tangible benefit so why didnt he wait as long as possible?
    Is there something horrible coming down the tubes that will hit late summer/autumn?
    What a complete shower (get it?) they all are – they’ll get kicked out, but will be replaced by carbon copy useless troughers.
    I am just going outside and may be some time……

    1. Dire, wasn’t it, 2CV? They cannot even be arsed to hide their agenda now.

    3. He’ll have the support of the Hunt Supporters Club judging by the AGM tonight. This Hunt Supporter won’t be helping out or voting for the con candidate and I am most certainly NOT going to the garden party. We’ve got a Limp Dim and I expect she’ll get in again, but we also have a Reform candidate so I’ll be supporting him.

  114. For the first time ever, I might not vote in a general election.
    There is no chance of me voting for the wooden oaf Starmer or the Unconservatives.
    Reform, if they put a candidate up, maybe.

    1. I didn’t bother in the end for the local elections but I probably will this time.

        2. Just had a look! Beautiful! A Northern Blue is new to me! I haven’t seen many here yest, even though the weather was fine until today.

          1. The northern blue was new to me too. It blew me away. Shame the Camberwell Beauty didn’t sit still long enough for a snapshot.

    2. “For the first time ever?”

      Did you vote for Stanley Baldwin. And Benjamin Disraeli? 😉

    3. I’ll vote but my vote won’t count for anything. There isn’t any chance of Andy Slaughter (Labour) losing Hammersmith and I won’t vote for him.

      1. Hemsworth, West Yorkshire. The days of weighing the Labour vote rather than counting it are long gone, but they’ve never lost yet.

  115. Move abroad, mate. You can choose. It’s better in all possible ways.

    1. I’m too old, buddy, I’m going to stay and fight for my children and grandchildren….. it looks like Reform to me!

        1. Off topic, JD – It’s our APCM this evening.

          We should have six CW’s – we have three, and one is standing down this evening. In fairness, I wouldn’t stand in her way. Despite being a a Deputy Lieutenant and former High Sheriff, she’s pretty useless. I’d offer my services, but – as an employee of the parish – this is apparently no longer allowed. Odd – since I was organist, choirmaster and churchwarden in Brandon, Suffolk during a 2 year interregnum.

          I had an email from our marginally most sensible CW in my inbox this morning, asking me to print the APCM reports / accounts. Fair enough, but I ran out of A3 paper, and scoured leafy Surrey to find a replacement ream. I think it may have been stored by Ryman in the car park, since every sheet decided to curl up on exit.

          Our (sound) Rector is apparently now in horse spittle, but straight answers aren’t forthcoming. Since he’s the last remaining member of a Ministry Team which once numbered at least six, I’m utterly unsurprised, but he has a typical bloke-ish attitude to illness: i.e. ignore the symptoms. I’m the same age, give or take a day or three, and I’ve been there. There’s a view that I’d still have had both feet had I reacted differently (though no-one in the NHS ever suggested as much). As Rector, he has ‘the living’, and retains some control over the Parish. He’ll be 70 in three years, and will have to retire. My own organist contract expires at the end of September next year. It remains to be seen whether any extension might be on offer. If not, I’ll concntrate on my Hauptwerk virtual organ project, so at least I’ll have an instrument to play in retirement…

          1. Sounds all a bit disorganised 2G.
            I read a fortnight ago that up to a quarter of parishes have no CW and of those that do, 75% would like to retire but there’s no one to hand over to.
            And still the Diocese treat us like dirt and serfs and wonder why ever fewer people will do it.

      2. Only useful if there are many of you – I hope there are.
        We’d had enough of the shite back in 1998.

      4. You’d better hope that your children and grand-children can fight for themselves, and even for you if necessary depending on how long you live, because further down the road it looks as though they are going to have to. It won’t be long before we know how many Ropers Labour will parachute into safe seats or very marginal Tory ones. It will be interesting.

        1. It will be horrible, Peta. Why are they allowing this to happen? Surely money is only worth so much.

          2. But power is only worth the good it is able to achieve – without that it is worse than nothing. These people don’t think deeply.

          3. Power can achieve evil too and these days most of the money, and therefore the power, is in the hands of the wrong people.

          4. Evil people? I’m not claiming any moral superiority, but I really cannot, for the life of me, understand the motivation. Why?

          6. Because evil exists and the deadly struggle between it and good is eternal. Right now it does feel as though evil is in the ascendancy.

          8. I agree with you opo, the only thing that worries me is how much worse are things going to have to get before it does?

        2. I’ll be OK – I’m a Crusader and the Lord grants power to my blade! I would have been a Templar but I didnt fancy the celibacy…..

          2. I didn’t join the Knights Templar. I stopped after Conclave and the Knights of St John.

          3. The Hospitallers were after me also, but I did’nt join them either – primarily because they were all dead (and headless)….

  116. Sadly, the Wets stabbed her in the front. I wonder if anyone back then appreciated that it was the Global Establishment that got rid of her? More innocent times, I imagine.

  117. – Is anyone out there actually looking forward to five years of a Rishi or Starmer led government with any enthusiasm?
    It’s a bit like being asked to choose how ones death sentence is to be carried out.
    Is it to be Rishi with the firing squad or Sir Keir with a thousand cuts?

    1. My worst case is a coalition where greens and Muslims hold the balance of power, looking back at the Troy/LibDem one it shows how dreadful it could be.

          1. With implications of some awful restrictions on behaviour and thoughts.

          5. We’ve strayed away from the original point which was that sharia means law and thus sharia law = law law.

    2. Since I am now able to vote in UK elections again, I had a quick look at the Macclesfield constituency. No reform party candidate, no raving looney party candidate and no other weirdo candidates in this extremely safe conservative riding.

      Is it worth the hassle of registering to scrawl NOTA or Take Trudeau please on a ballot paper.

      I will just have to vent somewhere else..

    3. Rishi firing squad? = prisoner NOT allowed last cigarette (unless can solve complex mathematical puzzle)

  118. The Olympic flame has passed through the area. The security was extraordinary in Perigueux from first thing in the morning.
    Gendarmes local, national and also CRS everywhere. Roads shut, even though they were nowhere near and virtually all parking place by road side closed off for the day.
    Heavily armed military on street corners. The driver this morning claimed to have a relative in the security side of the French Defence ministry and he said the threat levels are exceptionally high but it isn’t being made public . It sounds very nasty if what he said was true.
    His children’s school was swarming with police yesterday evening, they claimed it was pure coincidence, with the flame going through today, but he had heard on his grapevine that they feared a knife or gun atrocity.

    Happy days.

    1. I recall a story from French A-level that involved an Abbe de Perigueux. Don’t recall the name of the book, but it was for literature analysis, not for learning to speak French properly, or absorb French culture.

      1. It’s a lovely little city to visit, it goes back to pre Roman times and there are lots of museums and byways in the city to explore.
        There are excellent markets and the “cathedral” looks like Sacre Coeur in Paris. For good reason, because Sacre Coeur was modelled on it!

        The 5 good reasons to come and meet Saint-Front Cathedral 😀:
        1. Roman-Byzantine style cathedral listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as a site on the route to Santiago de Compostela.
        2. Building located on the paths to Santiago de Compostela.
        3. Cathedral restored by Paul Abadie in the 19th century who used it as a model to build the Sacred Heart in Montmartre.
        4. Inside, a majestic organ!
        5. Possibility of climbing onto the roofs of the cathedral for a panoramic discovery of Périgueux with the guides of the Office Intercommunal du Grand Périgueux.

        1. Finally, dragged out of the cobwebby recesses… “Candide” was the name of the main character, and the book. Utter shite.

    2. The Olympic torch relay came through our little town on the way to the 2010 Vancouver games. Oh for those days when security was limited, just about anyone could get out and trot beside the torch bearer for a few minutes without having plod push them aside.
      After the flame was passed onto the next torch, we kept one of the torches and it us now on display in the local sports arena.

      1. Oddly enough, once they were inside the security cordons, people were able to join in and have a great time.

      2. It was fun in 2012 when the torch was brought to the site of the 1908 Olympic Stadium at White City. Bruce Forsyth carried it over the 1908 finishing line, which is still there.

        2. I was in south Devon when the Olympic flame came through in 2102. Mr S and I took No 2 son along with us and parked on the A 379 about half an hour before the flame had been advertised as due – at about 8 am from memory. A small group of us gathered, waiting and waiting, expecting to see somebody running with the flame up the hill towards us. Instead, we were all dumbfounded when a minibus drove through, preceded by a few cars. It appeared that, other than in towns where the performance of carrying the torch was showcased, the blasted flame was carried in a vehicle. It was underwhelming to say the least.

  123. Sounds all too plausible, imho. After all, Blair is one of Schwab’s, Gates’ and Soros’ most reliable puppets.

  124. The Conservatives only hope is to put up huge posters of Labour’s likely front bench and the roles they will hold.

    If that doesn’t shake voters to the core, nothing will.

  125. Evening, all. We have been socked in all day with heavy rain. I see July 4th is the day of reckoning. Let’s make it UK Independence Day (by giving the legacy parties a bloody nose).

  126. MB is watching Chelsea.
    AAAARRRGGHHHHHH ……………………………………
    What happened to just showing nice flowers and gardens?
    I am effing, effing, effing sick of sodding illness, virtue signalling and being bloody lectured and hectored!!!!!!

          3. #metoo.
            It’s getting worse, too, the more distant I get from life in the UK.
            Hang in there, Conners, old lad, or I’ll end up on me own, and that I hate.

    2. Don’t let it worry you. Some people are unfeasibly besotted with the Clinton family.

      It defies belief!

        1. Yes he did. I for one get very frustrated trying to guess what the letters stand for. Today I have been struggling with Microsoft Word. Their tutorial mentions IVF, but to me that just means In Vitrio Fertiliation.

    2. 387508+ up ticks,

      Evening SE,
      Nota is an empty gesture,

      Now “Daisy the COW” not to be confused with treasa the treacherous
      cow.

      Daisy is a people / farmer
      friendly patriot of the highest order.

  129. Don’t sell yourself short, Conners! It’s difficult in print, with no verbal hints!

    1. True. There are no paralinguistic features in print unless someone writes “lol” or 🙂 or the equivalent, but I do tend to take things at face value.

    1. No one, absolutely no one thought the PM should be, you know, under a sort of umbrella? A tent? Little enough it is hilariously unprofessional, it’s humiliating for the bloke to be presentinng a sweeping change of government in a downpour.

      On second thoughts: he, his team, his entire tenure has been one of stabbing one boss after another in the back to get the job. He got it, he wrecked everything for his globalist masters. If only the rain would wash away the rest of the sewage infesting Whitehall.

        1. Any sort. A ruddy temporary tent would have been better. A ten second look at the bloody weather forecast for a brighter day would have been better! He could have announced it tomorrow.

          But no. He hops outside in the rain, reads a desperately boring statement full of tosh in the least enthusiastic voice imaginable. He has done everything you’d expect of a green communist. Before him Boris set about pushing a psychotic green agenda.

    1. Another side-effect of an election campaign is apparently that royal engagements get cancelled. Or so I read on Twitt. Does anyone know if that’s true?

      1. Yes, royal engagements get cancelled – or postponed, BB.

        D-Day will go ahead, Trooping of the Colour and the Japanese Royal visit – The Emperor and Empress of Japan have accepted an invitation from His Majesty The King to pay a State Visit to the United Kingdom in late June 2024 – may be postponed.

  143. Don’t you believe it.

    SirJasp will have complained, as I’m sure you have experienced..

  144. Due to the continual rain, other than doing a meal for the workers coming home and the washing up afterwards. I’ve done absolutely SFA today yet I feel totally bloody knackered and NOT looking forward to the 4th of July.
    If I do not have a candidate I feel confident I can trust, then I will still go to the Polling Station and will write None Of The Above on the paper.

    My country is FUCKED.

    And I’m off for an early bed.

  145. He has called the election for July by Sept. things will be very bad. They have created such a mess.
    Labour would make it worse, so for me there is only one choice.

      1. Never, 2 years in France and 3 years in Germany was more than enough for me.

      1. It won’t change the entire system of government. Only it’s collapse will do that.

        Socialism is driving the nation into chaos, poverty and ruin.

    6. We urgently need an entirely different form of government, one where the public control the statee, dictate the laws they want and the laws they don’t want, including repeal of existing laws. Budget to be refused in part or whole when presented but crucially it is the public who control what the state commits their money to.

      In short, the entire machine of government utterly paralysed, defunded without explicit public agreement.

      The public should also be only those who are, or have paid for it.

        2. Whenever socialists have ruined a country after they’ve killed millions of people those who’re left tend to get rid of the failure and replace it with a better one.

  146. 387508+ up ticks,

    Pillow ponder,

    Has come to a pretty pass after forty years
    polling station input the final solution to the political “final selection” plus, is to find us turning farm implements, as in hedge trimmers into head trimmers on an enemy
    yet to be decided betwixt the
    Russians, or the United Kingdoms parliamentary political top rankers.

    Ivan has never done me any harm whereas
    the United Kingdomes political top rankers
    has never stopped……….

      1. 387508+ up ticks,

        SE,
        If not planned initially it was certainly taken advantage of early doors.

    2. What bothered me was realising how many people are thick. Not just uneducated, but properly thick. As in refusing to think rationally. I remember a woman blocking a doctor’s office because she wouldn’t get out of the way. Her paranoia and idiocy was infuriating. She wanted everyone waiting to sign in to be some 50 feet away from her or something and would not move until she got what she wanted. Such people are dangerous because they know absolutely nothing.

      Sadly, ruddy Covid didn’t kill them off.

      Covid exists. It’s one of the rhinoviruses. A cold is at one end, SARS at the other. The stupidity and arrogance of some people who refused to behave in a rational fashion was tedious.

      1. Thank goodness that you believe in the existence of the Covid-19 virus. We can disagree about how dangerous it was and for whom. We can argue about whether the treatments and vaccines were worse than the disease. But to argue that neither the virus nor the disease ever existed is a delusion I have no time for.

        An acquaintance of mine died of Covid-19 gasping for breath. A friend’s wife was hospitalised for a week with the illness. They did not have bronchitis or emphysema or pneumonia or chronic pulmonary obstructive disease or asbestosis or influenza or lung cancer or asthma or cystic fibrosis or pneumoconiosis or tuberculosis or mesothelioma or the common cold, amongst others.

  148. Well, chums, it’s beddy-byes time for me. Good Night, sleep well, and I hope to see you all tomorrow.

    1. And in other news, Israel recognises the Basque region as an independent state, Eire as part of the UK and Norway as a separate Russian Protectorate.

  150. So does this mean that the WHO treaty cannot be signed (even if it has already beens signed before the event in that cunning British way, it cannot be now legitimate?) – it cannot be given Royal Assent as Parliament is dissolved until after the GE?

    1. This is an answer to much the same question over at another place:
      “I suppose if Parliament is dissolved next week it definitely won’t give any scrutiny to the WHO Pandemic Treaty and IHR Amendments. The only question then is whether they will be automatically passed as “new regulations” rather than a new treaty using Gordon Brown’s Constitutional Reform & Governance Act 2010. I think that’s very likely. People will not be happy.”

    1. They thought it would meet with public approval. They were partly right, although whether they met with even greater contempt is hard to judge. I imagine they wouldn’t want the approval of those who disagreed with this gesture as it would taint them in the eyes of those whose approbation they sought.

    1. I don’t think Diane Abbott has much influence these days. Her time has gone.

    2. The real power behind Starmer is Tony Blair (prospective candidate to succeed Klauss Schwab at the WEF).

      The ghastly Milibands are both still in the game yet biding their times.

      Those featured are collectively minnows with nothing whatever to offer the British people. We need shot of the lot of them, all of them parasites and bloodsuckers.

  154. Why now?

    Sunak is the puppet of Gates, Schwab and Soros. The decision was likely made at UK HQ Davos. Imho, Starmer is their preferred new operative because Sunak is beholden to his backbenchers and having trouble doing what the billionaires want.

  157. All of a sudden Sunak announces an Election without any forewarning.

    This smacks of panic and of his desire to exit Stage Left. The Tory Party has brought our country to its knees both economically but also in so many ways culturally and psychologically.

    We are a Nation in swift decline, we have lost all respect globally via mad geopolitical conflicts here, we have aligned with the wrong sides and our government has betrayed our trust on just about everything that matters to us.

    I suspect Sunak wishes to be out of it as the looming defeat of Ukraine in the US Proxy war with Russia concludes with the utter defeat of the Ukrainians.

    There will of of course be other factors including perhaps the exposure of Moderna MRNA vaccines as dangerous and harmful but where Sunak has significant investments. The little shit was keen to give approval to Moderna laboratories in Oxford and Wales.

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